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by Hesther Lynch Piozzi, Edited by Henry Morley
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Title: Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
during the last twenty years of his life
Author: Hesther Lynch Piozzi
Editor: Henry Morley
Release Date: August 28, 2007 [eBook #2324]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.***

This eText was transcribed from the 1901 Cassell and Company
edition by Les Bowler.

Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.during the lasttwenty years of his life.by
Hesther Lynch Piozzi.

CASSELL and
COMPANY, Limitedlondon, paris, new
york & melbourne
1901

INTRODUCTION

Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage
the Mrs. Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was,
after the year of his first introduction, 1765, in days of
infirmity, an honoured and a cherished friend. The year of
the beginning of the friendship was the year in which Johnson,
fifty-six years old, obtained his degree of LL.D. from Dublin,
and—though he never called himself Doctor—was
thenceforth called Doctor by all his friends.

Before her marriage Mrs. Piozzi had been Miss Hesther Lynch
Salusbury, a young lady of a good Welsh family. She was
born in the year 1740, and she lived until the year 1821.
She celebrated her eightieth birthday on the 27th of January,
1820, by a concert, ball, and supper to six or seven hundred
people, and led off the dancing at the ball with an adopted son
for partner. When Johnson was first introduced to her, as
Mrs. Thrale, she was a lively, plump little lady, twenty-five
years old, short of stature, broad of build, with an animated
face, touched, according to the fashion of life in her early
years, with rouge, which she continued to use when she found that
it had spoilt her complexion. Her hands were rather coarse,
but her handwriting was delicate.

Henry Thrale, whom she married, was the head of the great
brewery house now known as that of Barclay and Perkins.
Henry Thrale’s father had succeeded Edmund Halsey, who
began life by running away from his father, a miller at St.
Albans. Halsey was taken in as a clerk-of-all-work at the
Anchor Brewhouse in Southwark, became a house-clerk, able enough
to please Child, his master, and handsome enough to please his
master’s daughter. He married the daughter and
succeeded to Child’s Brewery, made much money, and had
himself an only daughter, whom he married to a lord. Henry
Thrale’s father was a nephew of Halseys, who had worked in
the brewery for twenty years, when, after Halsey’s death,
he gave security for thirty thousand pounds as the price of the
business, to which a noble lord could not succeed. In
eleven years he had paid the purchase-money, and was making a
large fortune. To this business his son, who was
Johnson’s friend, Henry Thrale, succeeded; and upon
Thrale’s death it was bought for £150,000 by a member
of the Quaker family of Barclay, who took Thrale’s old
manager, Perkins, into partnership.

Johnson became, after 1765, familiar in the house of the
Thrales at Streatham. There was much company. Mrs.
Thrale had a taste for literary guests and literary guests had,
on their part, a taste for her good dinners. Johnson was
the lion-in-chief. There was Dr. Johnson’s room
always at his disposal; and a tidy wig kept for his special use,
because his own was apt to be singed up the middle by close
contact with the candle, which he put, being short-sighted,
between his eyes and a book. Mrs. Thrale had skill in
languages, read Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. She
read literature, could quote aptly, and put knowledge as well as
playful life into her conversation. Johnson’s regard
for the Thrales was very real, and it was heartily returned,
though Mrs. Thrale had, like her friend, some weaknesses, in
common with most people who feed lions and wish to pass for wits
among the witty.

About fourteen years after Johnson’s first acquaintance
with the Thrales—when Johnson was seventy years old and
Mrs. Thrale near forty—the little lady, who had also lost
several children, was unhappy in the thought that she had ceased
to be appreciated by her husband. Her husband’s
temper became affected by the commercial troubles of 1762, and
Mrs. Thrale became jealous of the regard between him and Sophy
Streatfield, a rich widow’s daughter. Under January,
1779, she wrote in her “Thraliana,” “Mr. Thrale
has fallen in love, really and seriously, with Sophy Streatfield;
but there is no wonder in that; she is very pretty, very gentle,
soft, and insinuating; hangs about him, dances round him, cries
when she parts from him, squeezes his hand slily, and with her
sweet eyes full of tears looks so fondly in his face—and
all for love of me, as she pretends, that I can hardly sometimes
help laughing in her face. A man must not be a man
but an it to resist such artillery.” Mrs.
Thrale goes on to record conquests made by this irresistible
Sophy in other directions, showing the same temper of
jealousy. Thrale died on the 4th of April, 1781.

Mrs. Thrale had entered in her “Thraliana” under
July, 1780, being then at Brighton, “I have picked up
Piozzi here, the great Italian singer. He is amazingly like
my father. He shall teach Hesther.” On the 25th
of July, 1784, being at Bath, her entry was, “I am returned
from church the happy wife of my lovely, faithful Piozzi. . . .
subject of my prayers, object of my wishes, my sighs, my
reverence, my esteem.” Her age then was forty-four,
and on the 13th of December in the same year Johnson died.
The newspapers of the day dealt hardly with her. They
called her an amorous widow, and Piozzi a fortune-hunter.
Her eldest daughter (afterwards Viscountess Keith) refused to
recognise the new father, and shut herself up in a house at
Brighton with a nurse, Tib, where she lived upon two hundred a
year. Two younger sisters, who were at school, lived
afterwards with the eldest. Only the fourth daughter, the
youngest, went with her mother and her mother’s new husband
to Italy. Johnson, too, was grieved by the marriage, and
had shown it, but had written afterwards most kindly. Mrs.
Piozzi in Florence was playing at literature with the poetasters
of “The Florence Miscellany” and “The British
Album” when she was working at these “Anecdotes of
the Late Samuel Johnson.” Her book of anecdotes was
planned at Florence in 1785, the year after her friend’s
death, finished at Florence in October, 1785, and published in
the year 1786. There is a touch of bitterness in the book
which she thought of softening, but her “lovely, faithful
Piozzi” wished it to remain.

H. M.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

I have somewhere heard or read that the preface before a book,
like the portico before a house, should be contrived so as to
catch, but not detain, the attention of those who desire
admission to the family within, or leave to look over the
collection of pictures made by one whose opportunities of
obtaining them we know to have been not unfrequent. I wish
not to keep my readers long from such intimacy with the manners
of Dr. Johnson, or such knowledge of his sentiments as these
pages can convey. To urge my distance from England as an
excuse for the book’s being ill-written would be
ridiculous; it might indeed serve as a just reason for my having
written it at all; because, though others may print the same
aphorisms and stories, I cannot here be sure that they
have done so. As the Duke says, however, to the Weaver, in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Never excuse; if
your play be a bad one, keep at least the excuses to
yourself.”

I am aware that many will say I have not spoken highly enough
of Dr. Johnson; but it will be difficult for those who say so to
speak more highly. If I have described his manners as they
were, I have been careful to show his superiority to the common
forms of common life. It is surely no dispraise to an oak
that it does not bear jessamine; and he who should plant
honeysuckle round Trajan’s column would not be thought to
adorn, but to disgrace it.

When I have said that he was more a man of genius than of
learning, I mean not to take from the one part of his character
that which I willingly give to the other. The erudition of
Mr. Johnson proved his genius; for he had not acquired it by long
or profound study: nor can I think those characters the greatest
which have most learning driven into their heads, any more than I
can persuade myself to consider the River Jenisca as superior to
the Nile, because the first receives near seventy tributary
streams in the course of its unmarked progress to the sea, while
the great parent of African plenty, flowing from an almost
invisible source, and unenriched by any extraneous waters, except
eleven nameless rivers, pours his majestic torrent into the ocean
by seven celebrated mouths.

But I must conclude my preface, and begin my book, the first I
ever presented before the public; from whose awful appearance in
some measure to defend and conceal myself, I have thought fit to
retire behind the Telamonian shield, and show as little of myself
as possible, well aware of the exceeding difference there is
between fencing in the school and fighting in the field.
Studious, however, to avoid offending, and careless of that
offence which can be taken without a cause, I here not
unwillingly submit my slight performance to the decision of that
glorious country, which I have the daily delight to hear
applauded in others, as eminently just, generous, and humane.

ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

Too much intelligence is often as pernicious to biography as
too little; the mind remains perplexed by contradiction of
probabilities, and finds difficulty in separating report from
truth. If Johnson then lamented that so little had ever
been said about Butler, I might with more reason be led to
complain that so much has been said about himself; for numberless
informers but distract or cloud information, as glasses which
multiply will for the most part be found also to obscure.
Of a life, too, which for the last twenty years was passed in the
very front of literature, every leader of a literary company,
whether officer or subaltern, naturally becomes either author or
critic, so that little less than the recollection that it was
once the request of the deceased, and twice the
desire of those whose will I ever delighted to comply with,
should have engaged me to add my little book to the number of
those already written on the subject. I used to urge
another reason for forbearance, and say, that all the readers
would, on this singular occasion, be the writers of his life:
like the first representation of the Masque of Comus,
which, by changing their characters from spectators to
performers, was acted by the lords and ladies it was
written to entertain. This objection is, however,
now at an end, as I have found friends, far remote indeed from
literary questions, who may yet be diverted from melancholy by my
description of Johnson’s manners, warmed to virtue even by
the distant reflection of his glowing excellence, and encouraged
by the relation of his animated zeal to persist in the profession
as well as practice of Christianity.

Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller at
Lichfield, in Staffordshire; a very pious and worthy man, but
wrong-headed, positive, and afflicted with melancholy, as his
son, from whom alone I had the information, once told me: his
business, however, leading him to be much on horseback,
contributed to the preservation of his bodily health and mental
sanity, which, when he stayed long at home, would sometimes be
about to give way; and Mr. Johnson said, that when his workshop,
a detached building, had fallen half down for want of money to
repair it, his father was not less diligent to lock the door
every night, though he saw that anybody might walk in at the back
part, and knew that there was no security obtained by barring the
front door. “This,” says his son,
“was madness, you may see, and would have been discoverable
in other instances of the prevalence of imagination, but that
poverty prevented it from playing such tricks as riches and
leisure encourage.” Michael was a man of still larger
size and greater strength than his son, who was reckoned very
like him, but did not delight in talking much of his family:
“One has,” says he, “so little pleasure
in reciting the anecdotes of beggary.” One day,
however, hearing me praise a favourite friend with partial
tenderness as well as true esteem: “Why do you like that
man’s acquaintance so?” said he.
“Because,” replied I, “he is open and
confiding, and tells me stories of his uncles and cousins; I love
the light parts of a solid character.” “Nay, if
you are for family history,” says Mr. Johnson,
good-humouredly, “I can fit you: I had an uncle,
Cornelius Ford, who, upon a journey, stopped and read an
inscription written on a stone he saw standing by the wayside,
set up, as it proved, in honour of a man who had leaped a certain
leap thereabouts, the extent of which was specified upon the
stone: ‘Why now,’ says my uncle, ‘I could leap
it in my boots;’ and he did leap it in his boots. I
had likewise another uncle, Andrew,” continued he,
“my father’s brother, who kept the ring in Smithfield
(where they wrestled and boxed) for a whole year, and never was
thrown or conquered. Here now are uncles for you, Mistress,
if that’s the way to your heart.” Mr. Johnson
was very conversant in the art of attack and defence by boxing,
which science he had learned from this uncle Andrew, I believe;
and I have heard him descant upon the age when people were
received, and when rejected, in the schools once held for that
brutal amusement, much to the admiration of those who had no
expectation of his skill in such matters, from the sight of a
figure which precluded all possibility of personal prowess;
though, because he saw Mr. Thrale one day leap over a cabriolet
stool, to show that he was not tired after a chase of fifty miles
or more, he suddenly jumped over it too, but in a way so
strange and so unwieldy, that our terror lest he should break his
bones took from us even the power of laughing.

Michael Johnson was past fifty years old when he married his
wife, who was upwards of forty, yet I think her son told me she
remained three years childless before he was born into the world,
who so greatly contributed to improve it. In three years
more she brought another son, Nathaniel, who lived to be
twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and of whose manly spirit
I have heard his brother speak with pride and pleasure,
mentioning one circumstance, particular enough, that when the
company were one day lamenting the badness of the roads, he
inquired where they could be, as he travelled the country more
than most people, and had never seen a bad road in his
life. The two brothers did not, however, much delight in
each other’s company, being always rivals for the
mother’s fondness; and many of the severe reflections on
domestic life in Rasselas took their source from its
author’s keen recollections of the time passed in his early
years. Their father, Michael, died of an inflammatory fever
at the age of seventy-six, as Mr. Johnson told me, their mother
at eighty-nine, of a gradual decay. She was slight in her
person, he said, and rather below than above the common
size. So excellent was her character, and so blameless her
life, that when an oppressive neighbour once endeavoured to take
from her a little field she possessed, he could persuade no
attorney to undertake the cause against a woman so beloved in her
narrow circle: and it is this incident he alludes to in the line
of his “Vanity of Human Wishes,” calling her

“The general favourite as the general
friend.”

Nor could any one pay more willing homage to such a character,
though she had not been related to him, than did Dr. Johnson on
every occasion that offered: his disquisition on Pope’s
epitaph placed over Mrs. Corbet is a proof of that preference
always given by him to a noiseless life over a bustling one; but
however taste begins, we almost always see that it ends in
simplicity; the glutton finishes by losing his relish for
anything highly sauced, and calls for his boiled chicken at the
close of many years spent in the search of dainties; the
connoisseurs are soon weary of Rubens, and the critics of Lucan;
and the refinements of every kind heaped upon civil life always
sicken their possessors before the close of it.

At the age of two years Mr. Johnson was brought up to London
by his mother, to be touched by Queen Anne for the scrofulous
evil, which terribly afflicted his childhood, and left such marks
as greatly disfigured a countenance naturally harsh and rugged,
beside doing irreparable damage to the auricular organs, which
never could perform their functions since I knew him; and it was
owing to that horrible disorder, too, that one eye was perfectly
useless to him; that defect, however, was not observable, the
eyes looked both alike. As Mr. Johnson had an astonishing
memory, I asked him if he could remember Queen Anne at all?
“He had,” he said, “a confused, but somehow a
sort of solemn, recollection of a lady in diamonds, and a long
black hood.”

The christening of his brother he remembered with all its
circumstances, and said his mother taught him to spell and
pronounce the words ‘little Natty,’ syllable by
syllable, making him say it over in the evening to her husband
and his guests. The trick which most parents play with
their children, that of showing off their newly-acquired
accomplishments, disgusted Mr. Johnson beyond expression.
He had been treated so himself, he said, till he absolutely
loathed his father’s caresses, because he knew they were
sure to precede some unpleasing display of his early abilities;
and he used, when neighbours came o’ visiting, to run up a
tree that he might not be found and exhibited, such, as no doubt
he was, a prodigy of early understanding. His epitaph upon
the duck he killed by treading on it at five years old—

“Here lies poor duck
That Samuel Johnson trod on;
If it had liv’d it had been good luck,
For it would have been an odd one”—

is a striking example of early expansion of mind and knowledge
of language; yet he always seemed more mortified at the
recollection of the bustle his parents made with his wit than
pleased with the thoughts of possessing it.
“That,” said he to me one day, “is the great
misery of late marriages; the unhappy produce of them becomes the
plaything of dotage. An old man’s child,”
continued he, “leads much such a life. I think, as a
little boy’s dog, teased with awkward fondness, and forced,
perhaps, to sit up and beg, as we call it, to divert a company,
who at last go away complaining of their disagreeable
entertainment.” In consequence of these maxims, and
full of indignation against such parents as delight to produce
their young ones early into the talking world, I have known Mr.
Johnson give a good deal of pain by refusing to hear the verses
the children could recite, or the songs they could sing,
particularly one friend who told him that his two sons should
repeat Gray’s “Elegy” to him alternately, that
he might judge who had the happiest cadence. “No,
pray, sir,” said he, “let the dears both speak it at
once; more noise will by that means be made, and the noise will
be sooner over.” He told me the story himself, but I
have forgot who the father was.

Mr. Johnson’s mother was daughter to a gentleman in the
country, such as there were many of in those days, who
possessing, perhaps, one or two hundred pounds a year in land,
lived on the profits, and sought not to increase their
income. She was, therefore, inclined to think higher of
herself than of her husband, whose conduct in money matters being
but indifferent, she had a trick of teasing him about it, and
was, by her son’s account, very importunate with regard to
her fears of spending more than they could afford, though she
never arrived at knowing how much that was, a fault common, as he
said, to most women who pride themselves on their economy.
They did not, however, as I could understand, live ill together
on the whole. “My father,” says he,
“could always take his horse and ride away for orders when
things went badly.” The lady’s maiden name was
Ford; and the parson who sits next to the punch-bowl in
Hogarth’s “Modern Midnight Conversation” was
her brother’s son. This Ford was a man who chose to
be eminent only for vice, with talents that might have made him
conspicuous in literature, and respectable in any profession he
could have chosen. His cousin has mentioned him in the
lives of Fenton and of Broome; and when he spoke of him to me it
was always with tenderness, praising his acquaintance with life
and manners, and recollecting one piece of advice that no man
surely ever followed more exactly: “Obtain,” says
Ford, “some general principles of every science; he who can
talk only on one subject, or act only in one department, is
seldom wanted, and perhaps never wished for, while the man of
general knowledge can often benefit, and always
please.” He used to relate, however, another story
less to the credit of his cousin’s penetration, how Ford on
some occasion said to him, “You will make your way the more
easily in the world, I see, as you are contented to dispute no
man’s claim to conversation excellence; they will,
therefore, more willingly allow your pretensions as a
writer.” Can one, on such an occasion, forbear
recollecting the predictions of Boileau’s father, when
stroking the head of the young satirist?—“Ce petit
bon homme,” says he, “n’a point trop
d’esprit, mais il ne dira jamais mal de
personne.” Such are the prognostics formed by men
of wit and sense, as these two certainly were, concerning the
future character and conduct of those for whose welfare they were
honestly and deeply concerned; and so late do those features of
peculiarity come to their growth, which mark a character to all
succeeding generations.

Dr. Johnson first learned to read of his mother and her old
maid Catharine, in whose lap he well remembered sitting while she
explained to him the story of St. George and the Dragon. I
know not whether this is the proper place to add that such was
his tenderness, and such his gratitude, that he took a journey to
Lichfield fifty-seven years afterwards to support and comfort her
in her last illness; he had inquired for his nurse, and she was
dead. The recollection of such reading as had delighted him
in his infancy made him always persist in fancying that it was
the only reading which could please an infant; and he used to
condemn me for putting Newbery’s books into their hands as
too trifling to engage their attention. “Babies do
not want,” said he, “to hear about babies; they like
to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can
stretch and stimulate their little minds.” When in
answer I would urge the numerous editions and quick sale of
“Tommy Prudent” or “Goody
Two-Shoes.” “Remember always,” said he,
“that the parents buy the books, and that the
children never read them.” Mrs. Barbauld, however,
had his best praise, and deserved it; no man was more struck than
Mr. Johnson with voluntary descent from possible splendour to
painful duty.

At eight years old he went to school, for his health would not
permit him to be sent sooner; and at the age of ten years his
mind was disturbed by scruples of infidelity, which preyed upon
his spirits and made him very uneasy, the more so as he revealed
his uneasiness to no one, being naturally, as he said, “of
a sullen temper and reserved disposition.” He
searched, however, diligently but fruitlessly, for evidences of
the truth of revelation; and at length, recollecting a book he
had once seen in his father’s shop, entitled “De
Veritate Religionis,” etc., he began to think himself
highly culpable for neglecting such a means of information, and
took himself severely to task for this sin, adding many acts of
voluntary, and to others unknown, penance. The first
opportunity which offered, of course, he seized the book with
avidity, but on examination, not finding himself scholar enough
to peruse its contents, set his heart at rest; and, not thinking
to inquire whether there were any English books written on the
subject, followed his usual amusements, and considered his
conscience as lightened of a crime. He redoubled his
diligence to learn the language that contained the information he
most wished for, but from the pain which guilt had given him he
now began to deduce the soul’s immortality, which was the
point that belief first stopped at; and from that moment,
resolving to be a Christian, became one of the most zealous and
pious ones our nation ever produced. When he had told me
this odd anecdote of his childhood, “I cannot
imagine,” said he, “what makes me talk of myself to
you so, for I really never mentioned this foolish story to
anybody except Dr. Taylor, not even to my dear,
dear Bathurst, whom I loved better than ever I loved any
human creature; but poor Bathurst is dead!” Here a
long pause and a few tears ensued. “Why, sir,”
said I, “how like is all this to Jean Jacques
Rousseau—as like, I mean, as the sensations of frost and
fire, when my child complained yesterday that the ice she was
eating burned her mouth.” Mr. Johnson laughed
at the incongruous ideas, but the first thing which presented
itself to the mind of an ingenious and learned friend whom I had
the pleasure to pass some time with here at Florence was the same
resemblance, though I think the two characters had little in
common, further than an early attention to things beyond the
capacity of other babies, a keen sensibility of right and wrong,
and a warmth of imagination little consistent with sound and
perfect health. I have heard him relate another odd thing
of himself too, but it is one which everybody has heard as well
as me: how, when he was about nine years old, having got the play
of Hamlet in his hand, and reading it quietly in his
father’s kitchen, he kept on steadily enough till, coming
to the Ghost scene, he suddenly hurried upstairs to the street
door that he might see people about him. Such an incident,
as he was not unwilling to relate it, is probably in every
one’s possession now; he told it as a testimony to the
merits of Shakespeare. But one day, when my son was going
to school, and dear Dr. Johnson followed as far as the garden
gate, praying for his salvation in a voice which those who
listened attentively could hear plain enough, he said to me
suddenly, “Make your boy tell you his dreams: the first
corruption that entered into my heart was communicated in a
dream.” “What was it, sir?” said I.
“Do not ask me,” replied he, with much violence, and
walked away in apparent agitation. I never durst make any
further inquiries. He retained a strong aversion for the
memory of Hunter, one of his schoolmasters, who, he said, once
was a brutal fellow, “so brutal,” added he,
“that no man who had been educated by him ever sent his son
to the same school.” I have, however, heard him
acknowledge his scholarship to be very great. His next
master he despised, as knowing less than himself, I found, but
the name of that gentleman has slipped my memory. Mr.
Johnson was himself exceedingly disposed to the general
indulgence of children, and was even scrupulously and
ceremoniously attentive not to offend them; he had strongly
persuaded himself of the difficulty people always find to erase
early impressions either of kindness or resentment, and said
“he should never have so loved his mother when a man had
she not given him coffee she could ill afford, to gratify his
appetite when a boy.” “If you had had children,
sir,” said I, “would you have taught them
anything?” “I hope,” replied he,
“that I should have willingly lived on bread and water to
obtain instruction for them; but I would not have set their
future friendship to hazard for the sake of thrusting into their
heads knowledge of things for which they might not perhaps have
either taste or necessity. You teach your daughters the
diameters of the planets, and wonder when you have done that they
do not delight in your company. No science can be
communicated by mortal creatures without attention from the
scholar; no attention can be obtained from children without the
infliction of pain, and pain is never remembered without
resentment.” That something should be learned was,
however, so certainly his opinion that I have heard him say how
education had been often compared to agriculture, yet that it
resembled it chiefly in this: “That if nothing is sown, no
crop,” says he, “can be obtained.” His
contempt of the lady who fancied her son could be eminent without
study, because Shakespeare was found wanting in scholastic
learning, was expressed in terms so gross and so well known, I
will not repeat them here.

To recollect, however, and to repeat the sayings of Dr.
Johnson, is almost all that can be done by the writers of his
life, as his life, at least since my acquaintance with him,
consisted in little else than talking, when he was not absolutely
employed in some serious piece of work; and whatever work he did
seemed so much below his powers of performance that he appeared
the idlest of all human beings, ever musing till he was called
out to converse, and conversing till the fatigue of his friends,
or the promptitude of his own temper to take offence, consigned
him back again to silent meditation.

The remembrance of what had passed in his own childhood made
Mr. Johnson very solicitous to preserve the felicity of children:
and when he had persuaded Dr. Sumner to remit the tasks usually
given to fill up boys’ time during the holidays, he
rejoiced exceedingly in the success of his negotiation, and told
me that he had never ceased representing to all the eminent
schoolmasters in England the absurd tyranny of poisoning the hour
of permitted pleasure by keeping future misery before the
children’s eyes, and tempting them by bribery or falsehood
to evade it. “Bob Sumner,” said he,
“however, I have at length prevailed upon. I know
not, indeed, whether his tenderness was persuaded, or his reason
convinced, but the effect will always be the same. Poor Dr.
Sumner died, however, before the next vacation.”

Mr. Johnson was of opinion, too, that young people should have
positive, not general, rules given for their
direction. “My mother,” said he, “was
always telling me that I did not behave myself properly,
that I should endeavour to learn behaviour, and such cant;
but when I replied that she ought to tell me what to do, and what
to avoid, her admonitions were commonly, for that time at least,
at an end.”

This I fear was, however, at best a momentary refuge found out
by perverseness. No man knew better than Johnson in how
many nameless and numberless actions behaviour
consists—actions which can scarcely be reduced to rule, and
which come under no description. Of these he retained so
many very strange ones, that I suppose no one who saw his odd
manner of gesticulating much blamed or wondered at the good
lady’s solicitude concerning her son’s
behaviour.

Though he was attentive to the peace of children in general,
no man had a stronger contempt than he for such parents as openly
profess that they cannot govern their children.
“How,” says he, “is an army governed?
Such people, for the most part, multiply prohibitions till
obedience becomes impossible, and authority appears absurd, and
never suspect that they tease their family, their friends, and
themselves, only because conversation runs low, and something
must be said.”

Of parental authority, indeed, few people thought with a lower
degree of estimation. I one day mentioned the resignation
of Cyrus to his father’s will, as related by Xenophon,
when, after all his conquests, he requested the consent of
Cambyses to his marriage with a neighbouring princess, and I
added Rollin’s applause and recommendation of the
example. “Do you not perceive, then,” says
Johnson, “that Xenophon on this occasion commends like a
pedant, and Pere Rollin applauds like a slave? If Cyrus by
his conquests had not purchased emancipation, he had conquered to
little purpose indeed. Can you forbear to see the folly of
a fellow who has in his care the lives of thousands, when he begs
his papa permission to be married, and confesses his inability to
decide in a matter which concerns no man’s happiness but
his own?” Mr. Johnson caught me another time
reprimanding the daughter of my housekeeper for having sat down
unpermitted in her mother’s presence. “Why, she
gets her living, does she not,” said he, “without her
mother’s help? Let the wench alone,” continued
he. And when we were again out of the women’s sight
who were concerned in the dispute: “Poor people’s
children, dear lady,” said he, “never respect
them. I did not respect my own mother, though I loved
her. And one day, when in anger she called me a puppy, I
asked her if she knew what they called a puppy’s
mother.” We were talking of a young fellow who used
to come often to the house; he was about fifteen years old, or
less, if I remember right, and had a manner at once sullen and
sheepish. “That lad,” says Mr. Johnson,
“looks like the son of a schoolmaster, which,” added
he, “is one of the very worst conditions of
childhood. Such a boy has no father, or worse than none; he
never can reflect on his parent but the reflection brings to his
mind some idea of pain inflicted, or of sorrow
suffered.”

I will relate one thing more that Dr. Johnson said about
babyhood before I quit the subject; it was this: “That
little people should be encouraged always to tell whatever they
hear particularly striking to some brother, sister, or servant
immediately, before the impression is erased by the intervention
of newer occurrences. He perfectly remembered the first
time he ever heard of Heaven and Hell,” he said,
“because when his mother had made out such a description of
both places as she thought likely to seize the attention of her
infant auditor, who was then in bed with her, she got up, and
dressing him before the usual time, sent him directly to call a
favourite workman in the house, to whom he knew he would
communicate the conversation while it was yet impressed upon his
mind. The event was what she wished, and it was to that
method chiefly that he owed his uncommon felicity of remembering
distant occurrences and long past conversations.”

At the age of eighteen Dr. Johnson quitted school, and escaped
from the tuition of those he hated or those he despised. I
have heard him relate very few college adventures. He used
to say that our best accounts of his behaviour there would be
gathered from Dr. Adams and Dr. Taylor, and that he was sure they
would always tell the truth. He told me, however, one day
how, when he was first entered at the University, he passed a
morning, in compliance with the customs of the place, at his
tutor’s chambers; but, finding him no scholar, went no
more. In about ten days after, meeting the same gentleman,
Mr. Jordan, in the street, he offered to pass by without saluting
him; but the tutor stopped, and inquired, not roughly neither,
what he had been doing? “Sliding on the ice,”
was the reply, and so turned away with disdain. He laughed
very heartily at the recollection of his own insolence, and said
they endured it from him with wonderful acquiescence, and a
gentleness that, whenever he thought of it, astonished
himself. He told me, too, that when he made his first
declamation, he wrote over but one copy, and that coarsely; and
having given it into the hand of the tutor, who stood to receive
it as he passed, was obliged to begin by chance and continue on
how he could, for he had got but little of it by heart; so fairly
trusting to his present powers for immediate supply, he finished
by adding astonishment to the applause of all who knew how little
was owing to study. A prodigious risk, however, said some
one. “Not at all!” exclaims Johnson.
“No man, I suppose, leaps at once into deep water who does
not know how to swim.”

I doubt not but this story will be told by many of his
biographers, and said so to him when he told it me on the 18th of
July, 1773. “And who will be my biographer,”
said he, “do you think?” “Goldsmith, no
doubt,” replied I, “and he will do it the best among
us.” “The dog would write it best, to be
sure,” replied he; “but his particular malice towards
me, and general disregard for truth, would make the book useless
to all, and injurious to my character.” “Oh! as
to that,” said I, “we should all fasten upon him, and
force him to do you justice; but the worst is, the Doctor does
not know your life; nor can I tell indeed who does, except
Dr. Taylor of Ashbourne.” “Why, Taylor,”
said he, “is better acquainted with my heart than
any man or woman now alive; and the history of my Oxford exploits
lies all between him and Adams; but Dr. James knows my very early
days better than he. After my coming to London to drive the
world about a little, you must all go to Jack Hawkesworth for
anecdotes. I lived in great familiarity with him (though I
think there was not much affection) from the year 1753 till the
time Mr. Thrale and you took me up. I intend, however, to
disappoint the rogues, and either make you write the life, with
Taylor’s intelligence, or, which is better, do it myself,
after outliving you all. I am now,” added he,
“keeping a diary, in hopes of using it for that purpose
some time.” Here the conversation stopped, from my
accidentally looking in an old magazine of the year 1768, where I
saw the following lines with his name to them, and asked if they
were his:—

Verses said to be written by Dr. Samuel
Johnson, at the request of a gentleman to whom a lady had
given a sprig of myrtle.

“What hopes, what terrors, does thy gift create,
Ambiguous emblem of uncertain fate;
The myrtle, ensign of supreme command,
Consigned by Venus to Melissa’s hand:
Not less capricious than a reigning fair,
Now grants, and now rejects a lover’s prayer.
In myrtle shades oft sings the happy swain,
In myrtle shades despairing ghosts complain:
The myrtle crowns the happy lovers’ heads,
The unhappy lover’s grave the myrtle spreads:
Oh, then, the meaning of thy gift impart,
And ease the throbbings of an anxious heart!
Soon must this bough, as you shall fix his doom,
Adorn Philander’s head, or grace his tomb.”

“Why, now, do but see how the world is gaping for a
wonder!” cries Mr. Johnson. “I think it is now
just forty years ago that a young fellow had a sprig of myrtle
given him by a girl he courted, and asked me to write him some
verses that he might present her in return. I promised, but
forgot; and when he called for his lines at the time agreed
on—‘Sit still a moment,’ says I, ‘dear
Mund, and I’ll fetch them thee,’ so stepped aside for
five minutes, and wrote the nonsense you now keep such a stir
about.”

Upon revising these anecdotes, it is impossible not to be
struck with shame and regret that one treasured no more of them
up; but no experience is sufficient to cure the vice of
negligence. Whatever one sees constantly, or might see
constantly, becomes uninteresting; and we suffer every trivial
occupation, every slight amusement, to hinder us from writing
down what, indeed, we cannot choose but remember, but what we
should wish to recollect with pleasure, unpoisoned by remorse for
not remembering more. While I write this, I neglect
impressing my mind with the wonders of art and beauties of nature
that now surround me; and shall one day, perhaps, think on the
hours I might have profitably passed in the Florentine Gallery,
and reflecting on Raphael’s St. John at that time, as upon
Johnson’s conversation in this moment, may justly exclaim
of the months spent by me most delightfully in Italy—

“That I prized every hour that passed by,
Beyond all that had pleased me before;
But now they are past, and I sigh
And I grieve that I prized them no more.”

Shenstone.

Dr. Johnson delighted in his own partiality for Oxford; and
one day, at my house, entertained five members of the other
University with various instances of the superiority of Oxford,
enumerating the gigantic names of many men whom it had produced,
with apparent triumph. At last I said to him, “Why,
there happens to be no less than five Cambridge men in the room
now.” “I did not,” said he, “think
of that till you told me; but the wolf don’t count the
sheep.” When the company were retired, we happened to
be talking of Dr. Barnard, the Provost of Eton, who died about
that time; and after a long and just eulogium on his wit, his
learning, and his goodness of heart, “He was the only man,
too,” says Mr. Johnson, quite seriously, “that did
justice to my good breeding; and you may observe that I am
well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity. No
man,” continued he, not observing the amazement of his
hearers, “no man is so cautious not to interrupt another;
no man thinks it so necessary to appear attentive when others are
speaking; no man so steadily refuses preference to himself, or so
willingly bestows it on another, as I do; nobody holds so
strongly as I do the necessity of ceremony, and the ill effects
which follow the breach of it, yet people think me rude; but
Barnard did me justice.” “’Tis
pity,” said I, laughing, “that he had not heard you
compliment the Cambridge men after dinner to-day.”
“Why,” replied he, “I was inclined to
down them sure enough; but then a fellow deserves
to be of Oxford that talks so.” I have heard him at
other times relate how he used so sit in some coffee-house there,
and turn M---’s “C-r-ct-c-s” into ridicule for
the diversion of himself and of chance comers-in.
“The ‘Elf-da,’” says he, “was too
exquisitely pretty; I could make no fun out of that.”
When upon some occasions he would express his astonishment that
he should have an enemy in the world, while he had been doing
nothing but good to his neighbours, I used to make him recollect
these circumstances. “Why, child,” said he,
“what harm could that do the fellow? I always thought
very well of M---n for a Cambridge man; he is, I believe,
a mighty blameless character.” Such tricks were,
however, the more unpardonable in Mr. Johnson, because no one
could harangue like him about the difficulty always found in
forgiving petty injuries, or in provoking by needless
offence. Mr. Jordan, his tutor, had much of his affection,
though he despised his want of scholastic learning.
“That creature would,” said he, “defend his
pupils to the last: no young lad under his care should suffer for
committing slight improprieties, while he had breath to defend,
or power to protect them. If I had had sons to send to
College,” added he, “Jordan should have been their
tutor.”

Sir William Browne, the physician, who lived to a very
extraordinary age, and was in other respects an odd mortal, with
more genius than understanding, and more self sufficiency than
wit, was the only person who ventured to oppose Mr. Johnson when
he had a mind to shine by exalting his favourite university, and
to express his contempt of the Whiggish notions which prevail at
Cambridge. He did it once, however, with surprising
felicity. His antagonist having repeated with an air of
triumph the famous epigram written by Dr. Trapp—

“Our royal master saw, with heedful eyes,
The wants of his two universities:
Troops he to Oxford sent, as knowing why
That learned body wanted loyalty:
But books to Cambridge gave, as well discerning
That that right loyal body wanted learning.”

Which, says Sir William, might well be answered
thus:—

“The King to Oxford sent his troop of
horse,
For Tories own no argument but force;
With equal care to Cambridge books he sent,
For Whigs allow no force but argument.”

Mr. Johnson did him the justice to say it was one of the
happiest extemporaneous productions he ever met with, though he
once comically confessed that he hated to repeat the wit of a
Whig urged in support of Whiggism. Says Garrick to him one
day, “Why did not you make me a Tory, when we lived so much
together? You love to make people Tories.”
“Why,” says Johnson, pulling a heap of halfpence from
his pocket, “did not the king make these
guineas?”

Of Mr. Johnson’s Toryism the world has long been
witness, and the political pamphlets written by him in defence of
his party are vigorous and elegant. He often delighted his
imagination with the thoughts of having destroyed Junius, an
anonymous writer who flourished in the years 1769 and 1770, and
who kept himself so ingeniously concealed from every endeavour to
detect him that no probable guess was, I believe, ever formed
concerning the author’s name, though at that time the
subject of general conversation. Mr. Johnson made us all
laugh one day, because I had received a remarkably fine Stilton
cheese as a present from some person who had packed and directed
it carefully, but without mentioning whence it came. Mr.
Thrale, desirous to know who we were obliged to, asked every
friend as they came in, but nobody owned it. “Depend
upon it, sir,” says Johnson, “it was sent by
Junius.”

The “False Alarm,” his first and favourite
pamphlet, was written at our house between eight o’clock on
Wednesday night and twelve o’clock on Thursday night.
We read it to Mr. Thrale when he came very late home from the
House of Commons; the other political tracts followed in their
order. I have forgotten which contains the stroke at
Junius, but shall for ever remember the pleasure it gave him to
have written it. It was, however, in the year 1775 that Mr.
Edmund Burke made the famous speech in Parliament that struck
even foes with admiration, and friends with delight. Among
the nameless thousands who are contented to echo those praises
they have not skill to invent, I ventured, before Dr.
Johnson himself, to applaud with rapture the beautiful passage in
it concerning Lord Bathurst and the Angel, which, said our
Doctor, had I been in the house, I would have answered
thus:—

“Suppose, Mr. Speaker, that to Wharton or to
Marlborough, or to any of the eminent Whigs of the last age, the
devil had, not with any great impropriety, consented to appear,
he would, perhaps, in somewhat like these words, have commenced
the conversation:

“‘You seem, my lord, to be concerned at the
judicious apprehension that while you are sapping the foundations
of royalty at home, and propagating here the dangerous doctrine
of resistance, the distance of America may secure its inhabitants
from your arts, though active. But I will unfold to you the
gay prospects of futurity. This people, now so innocent and
harmless, shall draw the sword against their mother country, and
bathe its point in the blood of their benefactors; this people,
now contented with a little, shall then refuse to spare what they
themselves confess they could not miss; and these men, now so
honest and so grateful, shall, in return for peace and for
protection, see their vile agents in the House of Parliament,
there to sow the seeds of sedition, and propagate confusion,
perplexity, and pain. Be not dispirited, then, at the
contemplation of their present happy state: I promise you that
anarchy, poverty, and death shall, by my care, be carried even
across the spacious Atlantic, and settle in America itself, the
sure consequences of our beloved Whiggism.’”

This I thought a thing so very particular that I begged his
leave to write it down directly, before anything could intervene
that might make me forget the force of the expressions. A
trick which I have, however, seen played on common occasions, of
sitting steadily down at the other end of the room to write at
the moment what should be said in company, either by Dr.
Johnson or to him, I never practised myself, nor approved
of in another. There is something so ill-bred, and so
inclining to treachery in this conduct, that were it commonly
adopted all confidence would soon be exiled from society, and a
conversation assembly-room would become tremendous as a court of
justice. A set of acquaintance joined in familiar chat may
say a thousand things which, as the phrase is, pass well enough
at the time, though they cannot stand the test of critical
examination; and as all talk beyond that which is necessary to
the purposes of actual business is a kind of game, there will be
ever found ways of playing fairly or unfairly at it, which
distinguish the gentleman from the juggler. Dr. Johnson, as
well as many of my acquaintance, knew that I kept a common-place
book, and he one day said to me good-humouredly that he would
give me something to write in my repository. “I
warrant,” said he, “there is a great deal about me in
it. You shall have at least one thing worth your pains, so
if you will get the pen and ink I will repeat to you
Anacreon’s ‘Dove’ directly; but tell at the
same time that as I never was struck with anything in the Greek
language till I read that, so I never read anything in the
same language since that pleased me as much. I hope my
translation,” continued he, “is not worse than that
of Frank Fawkes.” Seeing me disposed to laugh,
“Nay, nay,” said he, “Frank Fawkes has done
them very finely.”

“Lovely courier of the sky,
Whence and whither dost thou fly?
Scatt’ring, as thy pinions play,
Liquid fragrance all the way.
Is it business? is it love?
Tell me, tell me, gentle Dove.
‘Soft Anacreon’s vows I bear,
Vows to Myrtale the fair;
Graced with all that charms the heart,
Blushing nature, smiling art.
Venus, courted by an ode,
On the bard her Dove bestowed.
Vested with a master’s right
Now Anacreon rules my flight;
His the letters that you see,
Weighty charge consigned to me;
Think not yet my service hard,
Joyless task without reward;
Smiling at my master’s gates,
Freedom my return awaits.
But the liberal grant in vain
Tempts me to be wild again.
Can a prudent Dove decline
Blissful bondage such as mine?
Over hills and fields to roam,
Fortune’s guest without a home;
Under leaves to hide one’s head,
Slightly sheltered, coarsely fed;
Now my better lot bestows
Sweet repast, and soft repose;
Now the generous bowl I sip
As it leaves Anacreon’s lip;
Void of care, and free from dread,
From his fingers snatch his bread,
Then with luscious plenty gay,
Round his chamber dance and play;
Or from wine, as courage springs,
O’er his face extend my wings;
And when feast and frolic tire,
Drop asleep upon his lyre.
This is all, be quick and go,
More than all thou canst not know;
Let me now my pinions ply,
I have chattered like a pie.’”

When I had finished, “But you must remember to
add,” says Mr. Johnson, “that though these verses
were planned, and even begun, when I was sixteen years old, I
never could find time to make an end of them before I was
sixty-eight.”

This facility of writing, and this dilatoriness ever to write,
Mr. Johnson always retained, from the days that he lay abed and
dictated his first publication to Mr. Hector, who acted as his
amanuensis, to the moment he made me copy out those variations in
Pope’s “Homer” which are printed in the
“Poets’ Lives.” “And now,”
said he, when I had finished it for him, “I fear not Mr.
Nicholson of a pin.” The fine ‘Rambler,’
on the subject of Procrastination, was hastily composed, as I
have heard, in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s parlour, while the boy
waited to carry it to press; and numberless are the instances of
his writing under immediate pressure of importunity or
distress. He told me that the character of Sober in the
‘Idler’ was by himself intended as his own portrait,
and that he had his own outset into life in his eye when he wrote
the Eastern story of “Gelaleddin.” Of the allegorical
papers in the ‘Rambler,’ Labour and Rest was his
favourite; but Scrotinus, the man who returns late in life to
receive honours in his native country, and meets with
mortification instead of respect, was by him considered as a
masterpiece in the science of life and manners. The
character of Prospero in the fourth volume Garrick took to be
his; and I have heard the author say that he never forgave the
offence. Sophron was likewise a picture drawn from reality,
and by Gelidus, the philosopher, he meant to represent Mr.
Coulson, a mathematician, who formerly lived at Rochester.
The man immortalised for purring like a cat was, as he told me,
one Busby, a proctor in the Commons. He who barked so
ingeniously, and then called the drawer to drive away the dog,
was father to Dr. Salter, of the Charterhouse. He who sang
a song, and by correspondent motions of his arm chalked out a
giant on the wall, was one Richardson, an attorney. The
letter signed “Sunday” was written by Miss Talbot;
and he fancied the billets in the first volume of the
‘Rambler’ were sent him by Miss Mulso, now Mrs.
Chapone. The papers contributed by Mrs. Carter had much of
his esteem, though he always blamed me for preferring the letter
signed “Chariessa” to the allegory, where religion
and superstition are indeed most masterly delineated.

When Dr. Johnson read his own satire, in which the life of a
scholar is painted, with the various obstructions thrown in his
way to fortune and to fame, he burst into a passion of tears one
day. The family and Mr. Scott only were present, who, in a
jocose way, clapped him on the back, and said,
“What’s all this, my dear sir? Why, you and I
and Hercules, you know, were all troubled with
melancholy.” As there are many gentlemen of
the same name, I should say, perhaps, that it was a Mr. Scott who
married Miss Robinson, and that I think I have heard Mr. Thrale
call him George Lowis, or George Augustus, I have forgot
which. He was a very large man, however, and made out the
triumvirate with Johnson and Hercules comically enough. The
Doctor was so delighted at his odd sally that he suddenly
embraced him, and the subject was immediately changed. I
never saw Mr. Scott but that once in my life.

Dr. Johnson was liberal enough in granting literary assistance
to others, I think; and innumerable are the prefaces, sermons,
lectures, and dedications which he used to make for people who
begged of him. Mr. Murphy related in his and my hearing one
day, and he did not deny it, that when Murphy joked him the week
before for having been so diligent of late between Dodd’s
sermon and Kelly’s prologue, Dr. Johnson replied,
“Why, sir, when they come to me with a dead staymaker and a
dying parson, what can a man do?” He said,
however, that “he hated to give away literary performances,
or even to sell them too cheaply. The next generation shall
not accuse me,” added he, “of beating down the price
of literature. One hates, besides, ever to give that which
one has been accustomed to sell. Would not you, sir,”
turning to Mr. Thrale, “rather give away money than
porter?”

Mr. Johnson had never, by his own account, been a close
student, and used to advise young people never to be without a
book in their pocket, to be read at bye-times when they had
nothing else to do. “It has been by that
means,” said he to a boy at our house one day, “that
all my knowledge has been gained, except what I have picked up by
running about the world with my wits ready to observe, and my
tongue ready to talk. A man is seldom in a humour to unlock
his bookcase, set his desk in order, and betake himself to
serious study; but a retentive memory will do something, and a
fellow shall have strange credit given him, if he can but
recollect striking passages from different books, keep the
authors separate in his head, and bring his stock of knowledge
artfully into play. How else,” added he, “do
the gamesters manage when they play for more money than they are
worth?” His Dictionary, however, could not, one would
think, have been written by running up and down; but he really
did not consider it as a great performance; and used to say
“that he might have done it easily in two years had not his
health received several shocks during the time.”

When Mr. Thrale, in consequence of this declaration, teased
him in the year 1768 to give a new edition of it, because, said
he, there are four or five gross faults: “Alas! sir,”
replied Johnson, “there are four or five hundred faults
instead of four or five; but you do not consider that it would
take me up three whole months’ labour, and when the time
was expired the work would not be done.” When the
booksellers set him about it, however, some years after, he went
cheerfully to the business, said he was well paid, and that they
deserved to have it done carefully. His reply to the person
who complimented him on its coming out first, mentioning the ill
success of the French in a similar attempt, is well known, and, I
trust, has been often recorded. “Why, what would you
expect, dear sir,” said he, “from fellows that eat
frogs?” I have, however, often thought Dr. Johnson
more free than prudent in professing so loudly his little skill
in the Greek language; for though he considered it as a proof of
a narrow mind to be too careful of literary reputation, yet no
man could be more enraged than he if an enemy, taking advantage
of this confession, twitted him with his ignorance; and I
remember when the King of Denmark was in England one of his
noblemen was brought by Mr. Colman to see Dr. Johnson at our
country house, and having heard, he said, that he was not famous
for Greek literature, attacked him on the weak side, politely
adding that he chose that conversation on purpose to favour
himself. Our Doctor, however, displayed so copious, so
compendious a knowledge of authors, books, and every branch of
learning in that language, that the gentleman appeared
astonished. When he was gone home, says Johnson,
“Now, for all this triumph I may thank Thrale’s
Xenophon here, as I think, excepting that one, I have not
looked in a Greek book these ten years; but see what haste my
dear friends were all in,” continued he, “to tell
this poor innocent foreigner that I know nothing of Greek!
Oh, no, he knows nothing of Greek!” with a loud burst of
laughing.

When Davies printed the “Fugitive Pieces” without
his knowledge or consent, “How,” said I, “would
Pope have raved, had he been served so!” “We
should never,” replied he, “have heard the last
on’t, to be sure; but then Pope was a narrow man. I
will, however,” added he, “storm and bluster
myself a little this time,” so went to London in all
the wrath he could muster up. At his return I asked how the
affair ended. “Why,” said he, “I was a
fierce fellow, and pretended to be very angry; and Thomas was a
good-natured fellow, and pretended to be very sorry; so
there the matter ended. I believe the dog loves me
dearly. Mr. Thrale,” turning to my husband,
“what shall you and I do that is good for Tom Davies?
We will do something for him, to be sure.”

Of Pope as a writer he had the highest opinion, and once when
a lady at our house talked of his preface to Shakespeare as
superior to Pope’s, “I fear not, madam,” said
he, “the little fellow has done wonders.” His
superior reverence of Dryden, notwithstanding, still appeared in
his talk as in his writings; and when some one mentioned the
ridicule thrown on him in the ‘Rehearsal,’ as having
hurt his general character as an author, “On the
contrary,” says Mr. Johnson, “the greatness of
Dryden’s reputation is now the only principle of vitality
which keeps the Duke of Buckingham’s play from
putrefaction.”

It was not very easy, however, for people not quite intimate
with Dr. Johnson to get exactly his opinion of a writer’s
merit, as he would now and then divert himself by confounding
those who thought themselves obliged to say to-morrow what he had
said yesterday; and even Garrick, who ought to have been better
acquainted with his tricks, professed himself mortified that one
time when he was extolling Dryden in a rapture that I suppose
disgusted his friend, Mr. Johnson suddenly challenged him to
produce twenty lines in a series that would not disgrace the poet
and his admirer. Garrick produced a passage that he had
once heard the Doctor commend, in which he now found, if I
remember rightly, sixteen faults, and made Garrick look silly at
his own table. When I told Mr. Johnson the story,
“Why, what a monkey was David now,” says he,
“to tell of his own disgrace!” And in the
course of that hour’s chat he told me how he used to tease
Garrick by commendations of the tomb-scene in Congreve’s
‘Mourning Bride,’ protesting, that Shakespeare had in
the same line of excellence nothing as good. “All
which is strictly true,” said he; “but that is
no reason for supposing Congreve is to stand in competition with
Shakespeare: these fellows know not how to blame, nor how to
commend.” I forced him one day, in a similar humour,
to prefer Young’s description of “Night” to the
so much admired ones of Dryden and Shakespeare, as more forcible
and more general. Every reader is not either a lover or a
tyrant, but every reader is interested when he hears that

“Creation sleeps; ’tis as the general
pulse
Of life stood still, and nature made a pause;
An awful pause—prophetic of its end.”

“This,” said he, “is true; but remember
that, taking the compositions of Young in general, they are but
like bright stepping-stones over a miry road. Young froths
and foams, and bubbles sometimes very vigorously; but we must not
compare the noise made by your tea-kettle here with the roaring
of the ocean.”

Somebody was praising Corneille one day in opposition to
Shakespeare. “Corneille is to Shakespeare,”
replied Mr. Johnson, “as a clipped hedge is to a
forest.” When we talked of Steele’s Essays,
“They are too thin,” says our critic, “for an
Englishman’s taste: mere superficial observations on life
and manners, without erudition enough to make them keep, like the
light French wines, which turn sour with standing awhile for want
of body, as we call it.”

Of a much-admired poem, when extolled as beautiful, he
replied, “That it had indeed the beauty of a bubble.
The colours are gay,” said he, “but the substance
slight.” Of James Harris’s Dedication to his
“Hermes,” I have heard him observe that, though but
fourteen lines long, there were six grammatical faults in
it. A friend was praising the style of Dr. Swift; Mr.
Johnson did not find himself in the humour to agree with him: the
critic was driven from one of his performances to the
other. At length, “You must allow me,”
said the gentleman, “that there are strong facts in
the account of ‘The Four Last Years of Queen
Anne.’” “Yes, surely, sir,” replies
Johnson, “and so there are in the Ordinary of
Newgate’s account.” This was like the story
which Mr. Murphy tells, and Johnson always acknowledged: how Mr.
Rose of Hammersmith, contending for the preference of Scotch
writers over the English, after having set up his authors like
ninepins, while the Doctor kept bowling them down again; at last,
to make sure of victory, he named Ferguson upon “Civil
Society,” and praised the book for being written in a
new manner. “I do not,” says Johnson,
“perceive the value of this new manner; it is only like
Buckinger, who had no hands, and so wrote with his
feet.” Of a modern Martial, when it came out:
“There are in these verses,” says Dr. Johnson,
“too much folly for madness, I think, and too much madness
for folly.” If, however, Mr. Johnson lamented that
the nearer he approached to his own times, the more enemies he
should make, by telling biographical truths in his “Lives
of the Later Poets,” what may I not apprehend, who, if I
relate anecdotes of Mr. Johnson, am obliged to repeat expressions
of severity, and sentences of contempt? Let me at least
soften them a little by saying that he did not hate the persons
he treated with roughness, or despise them whom he drove from him
by apparent scorn. He really loved and respected many whom
he would not suffer to love him. And when he related to me
a short dialogue that passed between himself and a writer of the
first eminence in the world, when he was in Scotland, I was
shocked to think how he must have disgusted him. “Dr.
--- asked me,” said he, “why I did not join in their
public worship when among them? for,” said he, “I
went to your churches often when in England.”
“So,” replied Johnson, “I have read that the
Siamese sent ambassadors to Louis Quatorze, but I never heard
that the King of France thought it worth his while to send
ambassadors from his court to that of Siam.”
He was no gentler with myself, or those for whom I had the
greatest regard. When I one day lamented the loss of a
first cousin killed in America, “Prithee, my dear,”
said he, “have done with canting. How would the world
be worse for it, I may ask, if all your relations were at once
spitted like larks, and roasted for Presto’s
supper?” Presto was the dog that lay under the table
while we talked. When we went into Wales together, and
spent some time at Sir Robert Cotton’s, at Lleweny, one day
at dinner I meant to please Mr. Johnson particularly with a dish
of very young peas. “Are not they charming?”
said I to him, while he was eating them.
“Perhaps,” said he, “they would be so—to
a pig.”

I only instance these replies, to excuse my mentioning those
he made to others.

When a well-known author published his poems in the year 1777:
“Such a one’s verses are come out,” said
I. “Yes,” replied Johnson, “and this
frost has struck them in again. Here are some lines I have
written to ridicule them; but remember that I love the fellow
dearly now, for all I laugh at him:—

“‘Wheresoe’er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new;
Endless labour all along,
Endless labour to be wrong;
Phrase that Time has flung away;
Uncouth words in disarray,
Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.’”

When he parodied the verses of another eminent writer, it was
done with more provocation, I believe, and with some merry
malice. A serious translation of the same lines, which I
think are from Euripides, may be found in Burney’s
“History of Music.” Here are the burlesque
ones:—

more than he thought they deserved, Mr. Johnson instantly
observed “that they were founded on a trivial conceit, and
that conceit ill-explained and ill-expressed besides. The
lady, we all know, does not conquer in the same manner as the
lion does. ’Tis a mere play of words,” added
he, “and you might as well say that

“‘If the man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,
’Tis a proof that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father.’”

And this humour is of the same sort with which he answered the
friend who commended the following line:—

“Who rules o’er freemen should himself
be free.”

“To be sure,” said Dr. Johnson—

“‘Who drives fat oxen should himself
be fat.’”

This readiness of finding a parallel, or making one, was shown
by him perpetually in the course of conversation. When the
French verses of a certain pantomime were quoted thus:

“‘In bed we laugh, in bed we cry,
And born in bed, in bed we die;
The near approach a bed may show
Of human bliss to human woe.’”

The inscription on the collar of Sir Joseph Banks’s
goat, which had been on two of his adventurous expeditions with
him, and was then, by the humanity of her amiable master, turned
out to graze in Kent as a recompense for her utility and faithful
service, was given me by Johnson in the year 1777, I think, and I
have never yet seen it printed:

The epigram written at Lord Anson’s house many years
ago, “where,” says Mr. Johnson, “I was well
received and kindly treated, and with the true gratitude of a wit
ridiculed the master of the house before I had left it an
hour,” has been falsely printed in many papers since his
death. I wrote it down from his own lips one evening in
August, 1772, not neglecting the little preface accusing himself
of making so graceless a return for the civilities shown
him. He had, among other elegancies about the park and
gardens, been made to observe a temple to the winds, when this
thought naturally presented itself to a wit:

“Three poets in three
distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn;
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of Nature could no further go,
To make a third she joined the former two.”

One evening in the oratorio season of the year 1771 Mr.
Johnson went with me to Covent Garden Theatre, and though he was
for the most part an exceedingly bad playhouse companion, as his
person drew people’s eyes upon the box, and the loudness of
his voice made it difficult for me to hear anybody but himself,
he sat surprisingly quiet, and I flattered myself that he was
listening to the music. When we were got home, however, he
repeated these verses, which he said he had made at the oratorio,
and he bade me translate them:

“The social club, the
lonely tower,
Far better suit thy midnight hour;
Let each according to his power
In worth or wisdom shine!

“And while play pleases
idle boys,
And wanton mirth fond youth employs,
To fix the soul, and free from toys,
That useful task be thine.”

The copy of verses in Latin hexameters, as well as I remember,
which he wrote to Dr. Lawrence, I forgot to keep a copy of; and
he obliged me to resign his translation of the song beginning,
“Busy, curious, thirsty fly,” for him to give Mr.
Langton, with a promise not to retain a copy. I
concluded he knew why, so never inquired the reason. He had
the greatest possible value for Mr. Langton, of Langton Hall,
Lincoln, of whose virtue and learning he delighted to talk in
very exalted terms; and poor Dr. Lawrence had long been his
friend and confident. The conversation I saw them hold
together in Essex Street one day, in the year 1781 or 1782, was a
melancholy one, and made a singular impression on my mind.
He was himself exceedingly ill, and I accompanied him thither for
advice. The physician was, however, in some respects more
to be pitied than the patient. Johnson was panting under an
asthma and dropsy, but Lawrence had been brought home that very
morning struck with the palsy, from which he had, two hours
before we came, strove to awaken himself by blisters. They
were both deaf, and scarce able to speak besides: one from
difficulty of breathing, the other from paralytic debility.
To give and receive medical counsel, therefore, they fairly sat
down on each side a table in the doctor’s gloomy apartment,
adorned with skeletons, preserved monsters, etc., and agreed to
write Latin billets to each other. Such a scene did I never
see. “You,” said Johnson, “are timide and
gelide,” finding that his friend had prescribed palliative,
not drastic, remedies. “It is not me,”
replies poor Lawrence, in an interrupted voice, “’tis
nature that is gelide and timide.” In fact, he lived
but few months after, I believe, and retained his faculties still
a shorter time. He was a man of strict piety and profound
learning, but little skilled in the knowledge of life or manners,
and died without having ever enjoyed the reputation he so justly
deserved.

Mr. Johnson’s health had been always extremely bad since
I first knew him, and his over-anxious care to retain without
blemish the perfect sanity of his mind contributed much to
disturb it. He had studied medicine diligently in all its
branches, but had given particular attention to the diseases of
the imagination, which he watched in himself with a solicitude
destructive of his own peace, and intolerable to those he
trusted. Dr. Lawrence told him one day that if he would
come and beat him once a week he would bear it, but to hear his
complaints was more than man could support.
’Twas therefore that he tried, I suppose, and in eighteen
years contrived to weary the patience of a woman.
When Mr. Johnson felt his fancy, or fancied he felt it,
disordered, his constant recurrence was to the study of
arithmetic, and one day that he was totally confined to his
chamber, and I inquired what he had been doing to divert himself,
he showed me a calculation which I could scarce be made to
understand, so vast was the plan of it, and so very intricate
were the figures: no other, indeed, than that the national debt,
computing it at one hundred and eighty millions sterling, would,
if converted into silver, serve to make a meridian of that metal,
I forgot how broad, for the globe of the whole earth, the real
globe. On a similar occasion I asked him, knowing
what subject he would like best to talk upon, how his opinion
stood towards the question between Paschal and Soame Jennings
about number and numeration? as the French philosopher observes
that infinity, though on all sides astonishing, appears most so
when the idea is connected with the idea of number; for the
notion of infinite number—and infinite number we know there
is—stretches one’s capacity still more than the idea
of infinite space. “Such a notion, indeed,”
adds he, “can scarcely find room in the human
mind.” Our English author, on the other hand,
exclaims, let no man give himself leave to talk about infinite
number, for infinite number is a contradiction in terms; whatever
is once numbered, we all see, cannot be infinite. “I
think,” said Mr. Johnson, after a pause, “we must
settle the matter thus: numeration is certainly infinite, for
eternity might be employed in adding unit to unit; but every
number is in itself finite, as the possibility of doubling it
easily proves; besides, stop at what point you will, you find
yourself as far from infinitude as ever.” These
passages I wrote down as soon as I had heard them, and repent
that I did not take the same method with a dissertation he made
one other day that he was very ill, concerning the peculiar
properties of the number sixteen, which I afterwards tried, but
in vain, to make him repeat.

As ethics or figures, or metaphysical reasoning, was the sort
of talk he most delighted in, so no kind of conversation pleased
him less, I think, than when the subject was historical fact or
general polity. “What shall we learn from that
stuff?” said he. “Let us not fancy, like Swift,
that we are exalting a woman’s character by telling how
she

“‘Could name the ancient heroes
round,
Explain for what they were renowned,’ etc.”

I must not, however, lead my readers to suppose that he meant
to reserve such talk for men’s company as a proof of
pre-eminence. “He never,” as he expressed it,
“desired to hear of the Punic War while he lived; such
conversation was lost time,” he said, “and carried
one away from common life, leaving no ideas behind which could
serve living wight as warning or direction.”

“How I should act is not the case,
But how would Brutus in my place.”

“And now,” cries Mr. Johnson, laughing with
obstreperous violence, “if these two foolish lines can be
equalled in folly, except by the two succeeding ones—show
them me.”

I asked him once concerning the conversation powers of a
gentleman with whom I was myself unacquainted. “He
talked to me at club one day,” replies our Doctor,
“concerning Catiline’s conspiracy, so I withdrew my
attention, and thought about Tom Thumb.”

Modern politics fared no better. I was one time
extolling the character of a statesman, and expatiating on the
skill required to direct the different currents, reconcile the
jarring interests, etc. “Thus,” replies he,
“a mill is a complicated piece of mechanism enough, but the
water is no part of the workmanship.” On another
occasion, when some one lamented the weakness of a then present
minister, and complained that he was dull and tardy, and knew
little of affairs: “You may as well complain, sir,”
says Johnson, “that the accounts of time are kept by the
clock; for he certainly does stand still upon the
stair-head—and we all know that he is no great
chronologer.” In the year 1777, or thereabouts, when
all the talk was of an invasion, he said most pathetically one
afternoon, “Alas! alas! how this unmeaning stuff spoils all
my comfort in my friends’ conversation! Will the
people have done with it; and shall I never hear a sentence again
without the French in it? Here is no invasion
coming, and you know there is none. Let the
vexatious and frivolous talk alone, or suffer it at least to
teach you one truth; and learn by this perpetual echo of
even unapprehended distress how historians magnify events
expected or calamities endured; when you know they are at this
very moment collecting all the big words they can find, in which
to describe a consternation never felt, for a misfortune which
never happened. Among all your lamentations, who eats the
less—who sleeps the worse, for one general’s
ill-success, or another’s capitulation? Oh,
pray let us hear no more of it!” No man,
however, was more zealously attached to his party; he not only
loved a Tory himself, but he loved a man the better if he heard
he hated a Whig. “Dear Bathurst,” said he to me
one day, “was a man to my very heart’s content: he
hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig;
he was a very good hater.”

Some one mentioned a gentleman of that party for having
behaved oddly on an occasion where faction was not concerned:
“Is he not a citizen of London, a native of North America,
and a Whig?” says Johnson. “Let him be absurd,
I beg you of you; when a monkey is too like a man, it
shocks one.”

Severity towards the poor was, in Dr. Johnson’s opinion
(as is visible in his “Life of Addison”
particularly), an undoubted and constant attendant or consequence
upon Whiggism; and he was not contented with giving them relief,
he wished to add also indulgence. He loved the poor as I
never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make
them happy. “What signifies,” says some one,
“giving halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out
in gin or tobacco.” “And why should they be
denied such sweeteners of their existence?” says Johnson;
“it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible
avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own
acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to
swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping
it still barer, and are not ashamed to show even visible
displeasure if ever the bitter taste is taken from their
mouths.” In consequence of these principles he nursed
whole nests of people in his house, where the lame, the blind,
the sick, and the sorrowful found a sure retreat from all the
evils whence his little income could secure them: and commonly
spending the middle of the week at our house, he kept his
numerous family in Fleet Street upon a settled allowance; but
returned to them every Saturday, to give them three good dinners,
and his company, before he came back to us on the Monday
night—treating them with the same, or perhaps more
ceremonious civility than he would have done by as many people of
fashion—making the Holy Scriptures thus the rule of his
conduct, and only expecting salvation as he was able to obey its
precepts.

While Dr. Johnson possessed, however, the strongest compassion
for poverty or illness, he did not even pretend to feel for those
who lamented the loss of a child, a parent, or a friend.
“These are the distresses of sentiment,” he would
reply, “which a man who is really to be pitied has no
leisure to feel. The sight of people who want food and
raiment is so common in great cities, that a surly fellow like me
has no compassion to spare for wounds given only to vanity or
softness.” No man, therefore, who smarted from the
ingratitude of his friends, found any sympathy from our
philosopher. “Let him do good on higher motives next
time,” would be the answer; “he will then be sure of
his reward.” It is easy to observe that the justice
of such sentences made them offensive; but we must be careful how
we condemn a man for saying what we know to be true, only because
it is so. I hope that the reason our hearts rebelled
a little against his severity was chiefly because it came from a
living mouth. Books were invented to take off the odium of
immediate superiority, and soften the rigour of duties prescribed
by the teachers and censors of human kind—setting at least
those who are acknowledged wiser than ourselves at a
distance. When we recollect, however, that for this very
reason they are seldom consulted and little obeyed, how
much cause shall his contemporaries have to rejoice that their
living Johnson forced them to feel there proofs due to vice and
folly, while Seneca and Tillotson were no longer able to make
impression—except on our shelves! Few things, indeed,
which pass well enough with others would do with him: he had been
a great reader of Mandeville, and was ever on the watch to spy
out those stains of original corruption so easily discovered by a
penetrating observer even in the purest minds. I mentioned
an event, which if it had happened would greatly have injured Mr.
Thrale and his family—“and then, dear sir,”
said I, “how sorry you would have been!”
“I hope,” replied he, after a long pause,
“I should have been very sorry; but remember
Rochefoucault’s maxim.”

“I would rather,” answered I, “remember
Prior’s verses, and ask—

‘What need of books these truths to tell,
Which folks perceive that cannot spell?
And must we spectacles apply,
To see what hurts our naked eye?’

Will anybody’s mind bear this eternal microscope
that you place upon your own so?” “I
never,” replied he, “saw one that would,
except that of my dear Miss Reynolds—and hers is very near
to purity itself.” Of slighter evils, and friends
more distant than our own household, he spoke less
cautiously. An acquaintance lost the almost certain hope of
a good estate that had been long expected. “Such a
one will grieve,” said I, “at her friend’s
disappointment.” “She will suffer as much,
perhaps,” said he, “as your horse did when your cow
miscarried.” I professed myself sincerely grieved
when accumulated distresses crushed Sir George Colebrook’s
family; and I was so. “Your own prosperity,”
said he, “may possibly have so far increased the natural
tenderness of your heart, that for aught I know you may be
a little sorry; but it is sufficient for a plain man if he
does not laugh when he sees a fine new house tumble down all on a
sudden, and a snug cottage stand by ready to receive the owner,
whose birth entitled him to nothing better, and whose limbs are
left him to go to work again with.”

I tried to tell him in jest that his morality was easily
contented, and when I have said something as if the wickedness of
the world gave me concern, he would cry out aloud against
canting, and protest that he thought there was very little gross
wickedness in the world, and still less of extraordinary
virtue. Nothing, indeed, more surely disgusted Dr. Johnson
than hyperbole; he loved not to be told of sallies of excellence,
which he said were seldom valuable, and seldom true.
“Heroic virtues,” said he, “are the bons mots
of life; they do not appear often, and when they do appear are
too much prized, I think, like the aloe-tree, which shoots and
flowers once in a hundred years. But life is made up of
little things; and that character is the best which does little
but repeated acts of beneficence; as that conversation is the
best which consists in elegant and pleasing thoughts expressed in
natural and pleasing terms. With regard to my own notions
of moral virtue,” continued he, “I hope I have not
lost my sensibility of wrong; but I hope, likewise, that I have
lived long enough in the world to prevent me from expecting to
find any action of which both the original motive and all the
parts were good.”

The piety of Dr. Johnson was exemplary and edifying; he was
punctiliously exact to perform every public duty enjoined by the
Church, and his spirit of devotion had an energy that affected
all who ever saw him pray in private. The coldest and most
languid hearer of the Word must have felt themselves animated by
his manner of reading the Holy Scriptures; and to pray by his
sick-bed required strength of body as well as of mind, so
vehement were his manners, and his tones of voice so
pathetic. I have many times made it my request to Heaven
that I might be spared the sight of his death; and I was spared
it.

Mr. Johnson, though in general a gross feeder, kept fast in
Lent, particularly the Holy Week, with a rigour very dangerous to
his general health; but though he had left off wine (for
religious motives, as I always believed, though he did not own
it), yet he did not hold the commutation of offences by voluntary
penance, or encourage others to practise severity upon
themselves. He even once said “that he thought it an
error to endeavour at pleasing God by taking the rod of reproof
out of His hands.” And when we talked of convents,
and the hardships suffered in them: “Remember
always,” said he, “that a convent is an idle place,
and where there is nothing to be done something must be
endured: mustard has a bad taste per se, you may observe,
but very insipid food cannot be eaten without it.”

His respect, however, for places of religious retirement was
carried to the greatest degree of earthly veneration; the
Benedictine convent at Paris paid him all possible honours in
return, and the Prior and he parted with tears of
tenderness. Two of that college being sent to England on
the mission some years after, spent much of their time with him
at Bolt Court, I know, and he was ever earnest to retain their
friendship; but though beloved by all his Roman Catholic
acquaintance, particularly Dr. Nugent, for whose esteem he had a
singular value, yet was Mr. Johnson a most unshaken Church of
England man; and I think, or at least I once did think,
that a letter written by him to Mr. Barnard, the King’s
Librarian, when he was in Italy collecting books, contained some
very particular advice to his friend to be on his guard against
the seductions of the Church of Rome.

The settled aversion Dr. Johnson felt towards an infidel he
expressed to all ranks, and at all times, without the smallest
reserve; for though on common occasions he paid great deference
to birth or title, yet his regard for truth and virtue never gave
way to meaner considerations. We talked of a dead wit one
evening, and somebody praised him. “Let us never
praise talents so ill employed, sir; we foul our mouths by
commending such infidels,” said he. “Allow him
the lumieres at least,” entreated one of the company.
“I do allow him, sir,” replied Johnson, “just
enough to light him to hell.” Of a Jamaica gentleman,
then lately dead: “He will not, whither he is now
gone,” said Johnson, “find much difference, I
believe, either in the climate or the company.” The
Abbe Reynal probably remembers that, being at the house of a
common friend in London, the master of it approached Johnson with
that gentleman so much celebrated in his hand, and this speech in
his mouth: “Will you permit me, sir, to present to you the
Abbe Reynal?” “No, sir,”
replied the Doctor very loud, and suddenly turned away from them
both.

Though Mr. Johnson had but little reverence either for talents
or fortune when he found them unsupported by virtue, yet it was
sufficient to tell him a man was very pious, or very charitable,
and he would at least begin with him on good terms,
however the conversation might end. He would sometimes,
too, good-naturedly enter into a long chat for the instruction or
entertainment of people he despised. I perfectly recollect
his condescending to delight my daughter’s dancing-master
with a long argument about his art, which the man
protested, at the close of the discourse, the Doctor knew more of
than himself, who remained astonished, enlightened, and amused by
the talk of a person little likely to make a good disquisition
upon dancing. I have sometimes, indeed, been rather pleased
than vexed when Mr. Johnson has given a rough answer to a man who
perhaps deserved one only half as rough, because I knew he would
repent of his hasty reproof, and make us all amends by some
conversation at once instructive and entertaining, as in the
following cases. A young fellow asked him abruptly one day,
“Pray, sir, what and where is Palmyra? I heard
somebody talk last night of the ruins of Palmyra.”
“’Tis a hill in Ireland,” replies Johnson,
“with palms growing on the top, and a bog at the bottom,
and so they call it Palm-mira.” Seeing,
however, that the lad thought him serious, and thanked him for
the information, he undeceived him very gently indeed: told him
the history, geography, and chronology of Tadmor in the
wilderness, with every incident that literature could furnish, I
think, or eloquence express, from the building of Solomon’s
palace to the voyage of Dawkins and Wood.

On another occasion, when he was musing over the fire in our
drawing-room at Streatham, a young gentleman called to him
suddenly, and I suppose he thought disrespectfully, in these
words: “Mr. Johnson, would you advise me to
marry?” “I would advise no man to marry,
sir,” returns for answer in a very angry tone Dr. Johnson,
“who is not likely to propagate understanding,” and
so left the room. Our companion looked confounded, and I
believe had scarce recovered the consciousness of his own
existence, when Johnson came back, and drawing his chair among
us, with altered looks and a softened voice, joined in the
general chat, insensibly led the conversation to the subject of
marriage, where he laid himself out in a dissertation so useful,
so elegant, so founded on the true knowledge of human life, and
so adorned with beauty of sentiment, that no one ever recollected
the offence, except to rejoice in its consequences. He
repented just as certainly, however, if he had been led to praise
any person or thing by accident more than he thought it deserved;
and was on such occasions comically earnest to destroy the praise
or pleasure he had unintentionally given.

Sir Joshua Reynolds mentioned some picture as excellent.
“It has often grieved me, sir,” said Mr. Johnson,
“to see so much mind as the science of painting requires
laid out upon such perishable materials. Why do not you
oftener make use of copper? I could wish your superiority
in the art you profess to be preserved in stuff more durable than
canvas.” Sir Joshua urged the difficulty of procuring
a plate large enough for historical subjects, and was going to
raise further observations. “What foppish obstacles
are these!” exclaims on a sudden Dr. Johnson.
“Here is Thrale has a thousand tun of copper; you may paint
it all round if you will, I suppose; it will serve him to brew in
afterwards. Will it not, sir?” (to my husband, who
sat by). Indeed, Dr. Johnson’s utter scorn of
painting was such that I have heard him say that he should sit
very quietly in a room hung round with the works of the greatest
masters, and never feel the slightest disposition to turn them if
their backs were outermost, unless it might be for the sake of
telling Sir Joshua that he had turned them. Such
speeches may appear offensive to many, but those who knew he was
too blind to discern the perfections of an art which applies
itself immediately to our eyesight must acknowledge he was not in
the wrong.

He delighted no more in music than in painting; he was almost
as deaf as he was blind; travelling with Dr. Johnson was for
these reasons tiresome enough. Mr. Thrale loved prospects,
and was mortified that his friend could not enjoy the sight of
those different dispositions of wood and water, hill and valley,
that travelling through England and France affords a man.
But when he wished to point them out to his companion:
“Never heed such nonsense,” would be the reply;
“a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in
one country or another. Let us, if we do talk, talk
about something; men and women are my subjects of inquiry; let us
see how these differ from those we have left behind.”

When we were at Rouen together, he took a great fancy to the
Abbe Roffette, with whom he conversed about the destruction of
the order of Jesuits, and condemned it loudly as a blow to the
general power of the Church, and likely to be followed with many
and dangerous innovations, which might at length become fatal to
religion itself, and shake even the foundation of
Christianity. The gentleman seemed to wonder and delight in
his conversation. The talk was all in Latin, which both
spoke fluently, and Mr. Johnson pronounced a long eulogium upon
Milton with so much ardour, eloquence, and ingenuity, that the
Abbe rose from his seat and embraced him. My husband,
seeing them apparently so charmed with the company of each other,
politely invited the Abbe to England, intending to oblige his
friend, who, instead of thanking, reprimanded him severely before
the man for such a sudden burst of tenderness towards a person he
could know nothing at all of, and thus put a sudden finish to all
his own and Mr. Thrale’s entertainment from the company of
the Abbe Roffette.

When at Versailles the people showed us the theatre. As
we stood on the stage looking at some machinery for playhouse
purposes: “Now we are here, what shall we act, Mr.
Johnson—The Englishman at Paris?” “No,
no,” replied he, “we will try to act Harry the
Fifth.” His dislike to the French was well known to
both nations, I believe; but he applauded the number of their
books and the graces of their style. “They have few
sentiments,” said he, “but they express them neatly;
they have little meat, too, but they dress it well.”
Johnson’s own notions about eating, however, were nothing
less than delicate: a leg of pork boiled till it dropped from the
bone, a veal pie with plums and sugar, or the outside cut of a
salt buttock of beef, were his favourite dainties. With
regard to drink, his liking was for the strongest, as it was not
the flavour, but the effect, he sought for, and professed to
desire; and when I first knew him, he used to pour capillaire
into his port wine. For the last twelve years, however, he
left off all fermented liquors. To make himself some
amends, indeed, he took his chocolate liberally, pouring in large
quantities of cream, or even melted butter; and was so fond of
fruit, that though he usually ate seven or eight large peaches of
a morning before breakfast began, and treated them with
proportionate attention after dinner again, yet I have heard him
protest that he never had quite as much as he wished of
wall-fruit, except once in his life, and that was when we were
all together at Ombersley, the seat of my Lord Sandys. I
was saying to a friend one day, that I did not like goose;
“one smells it so while it is roasting,” said
I. “But you, madam,” replies the Doctor,
“have been at all times a fortunate woman, having always
had your hunger so forestalled by indulgence, that you never
experienced the delight of smelling your dinner
beforehand.” “Which pleasure,” answered I
pertly, “is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the
happiness to pass through Porridge Island of a
morning.” “Come, come,” says he, gravely,
“let’s have no sneering at what is serious to so
many. Hundreds of your fellow-creatures, dear lady, turn
another way, that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of
Porridge Island to wish for gratifications they are not able to
obtain. You are certainly not better than all of
them; give God thanks that you are happier.”

I received on another occasion as just a rebuke from Mr.
Johnson, for an offence of the same nature, and hope I took care
never to provoke a third; for after a very long summer,
particularly hot and dry, I was wishing naturally but
thoughtlessly for some rain to lay the dust as we drove along the
Surrey roads. “I cannot bear,” replied he, with
much asperity and an altered look, “when I know how many
poor families will perish next winter for want of that bread
which the present drought will deny them, to hear ladies sighing
for rain, only that their complexions may not suffer from the
heat, or their clothes be incommoded by the dust. For
shame! leave off such foppish lamentations, and study to relieve
those whose distresses are real.”

With advising others to be charitable, however, Dr. Johnson
did not content himself. He gave away all he had, and all
he ever had gotten, except the two thousand pounds he left
behind; and the very small portion of his income which he spent
on himself, with all our calculation, we never could make more
than seventy, or at most four-score pounds a year, and he
pretended to allow himself a hundred. He had numberless
dependents out of doors as well as in, who, as he expressed it,
“did not like to see him latterly unless he brought
’em money.” For those people he used frequently
to raise contributions on his richer friends; “and
this,” says he, “is one of the thousand reasons which
ought to restrain a man from drony solitude and useless
retirement. Solitude,” added he one day, “is
dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue:
pleasures of some sort are necessary to the intellectual as to
the corporeal health; and those who resist gaiety will be likely
for the most part to fall a sacrifice to appetite; for the
solicitations of sense are always at hand, and a dram to a vacant
and solitary person is a speedy and seducing relief.
Remember,” concluded he, “that the solitary mortal is
certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad:
the mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid, and is
extinguished like a candle in foul air.” It was on
this principle that Johnson encouraged parents to carry their
daughters early and much into company: “for what harm can
be done before so many witnesses? Solitude is the surest
nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of
preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor
leisure to let tender expressions soften or sink into her
heart. The ball, the show, are not the dangerous places:
no, it is the private friend, the kind consoler, the companion of
the easy, vacant hour, whose compliance with her opinions can
flatter her vanity, and whose conversation can just soothe,
without ever stretching her mind, that is the lover to be
feared. He who buzzes in her ear at court or at the opera
must be contented to buzz in vain.” These notions Dr.
Johnson carried so very far, that I have heard him say, “If
you shut up any man with any woman, so as to make them derive
their whole pleasure from each other, they would inevitably fall
in love, as it is called, with each other; but at six
months’ end, if you would throw them both into public life,
where they might change partners at pleasure, each would soon
forget that fondness which mutual dependence and the paucity of
general amusement alone had caused, and each would separately
feel delighted by their release.”

In these opinions Rousseau apparently concurs with him
exactly; and Mr. Whitehead’s poem, called
“Variety,” is written solely to elucidate this simple
proposition. Prior likewise advises the husband to send his
wife abroad, and let her see the world as it really
stands:—

“Powder, and pocket-glass, and
beau.”

Mr. Johnson was indeed unjustly supposed to be a lover of
singularity. Few people had a more settled reverence for
the world than he, or was less captivated by new modes of
behaviour introduced, or innovations on the long-received customs
of common life. He hated the way of leaving a company
without taking notice to the lady of the house that he was going,
and did not much like any of the contrivances by which ease had
lately been introduced into society instead of ceremony, which
had more of his approbation. Cards, dress, and dancing,
however, all found their advocate in Dr. Johnson, who inculcated,
upon principle, the cultivation of those arts which many a
moralist thinks himself bound to reject, and many a Christian
holds unfit to be practised. “No person,” said
he one day, “goes under-dressed till he thinks himself of
consequence enough to forbear carrying the badge of his rank upon
his back.” And in answer to the arguments urged by
Puritans, Quakers, etc., against showy decorations of the human
figure, I once heard him exclaim, “Oh, let us not be found,
when our Master calls us, ripping the lace off our waistcoats,
but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues!
Let us all conform in outward customs, which are of no
consequence, to the manners of those whom we live among, and
despise such paltry distinctions. Alas, sir!”
continued he, “a man who cannot get to heaven in a green
coat, will not find his way thither sooner in a grey
one.” On an occasion of less consequence, when he
turned his back on Lord Bolingbroke in the rooms at
Brighthelmstone, he made this excuse, “I am not obliged,
sir,” said he to Mr. Thrale, who stood fretting, “to
find reasons for respecting the rank of him who will not
condescend to declare it by his dress or some other visible
mark. What are stars and other signs of superiority made
for?”

The next evening, however, he made us comical amends, by
sitting by the same nobleman, and haranguing very loudly about
the nature and use and abuse of divorces. Many people
gathered round them to hear what was said, and when my husband
called him away, and told him to whom he had been talking,
received an answer which I will not write down.

Though no man, perhaps, made such rough replies as Dr.
Johnson, yet nobody had a more just aversion to general satire;
he always hated and censured Swift for his unprovoked bitterness
against the professors of medicine, and used to challenge his
friends, when they lamented the exorbitancy of physicians’
fees, to produce him one instance of an estate raised by physic
in England. When an acquaintance, too, was one day
exclaiming against the tediousness of the law and its partiality:
“Let us hear, sir,” said Johnson, “no general
abuse; the law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon
human experience for the benefit of the public.”

As the mind of Dr. Johnson was greatly expanded, so his first
care was for general, not particular or petty morality; and those
teachers had more of his blame than praise, I think, who seek to
oppress life with unnecessary scruples. “Scruples
would,” as he observed, “certainly make men
miserable, and seldom make them good. Let us ever,”
he said, “studiously fly from those instructors against
whom our Saviour denounces heavy judgments, for having bound up
burdens grievous to be borne, and laid them on the shoulders of
mortal men.” No one had, however, higher notions of
the hard task of true Christianity than Johnson, whose daily
terror lest he had not done enough, originated in piety, but
ended in little less than disease. Reasonable with regard
to others, he had formed vain hopes of performing impossibilities
himself; and finding his good works ever below his desires and
intent, filled his imagination with fears that he should never
obtain forgiveness for omissions of duty and criminal waste of
time. These ideas kept him in constant anxiety concerning
his salvation; and the vehement petitions he perpetually made for
a longer continuance on earth, were doubtless the cause of his so
prolonged existence: for when I carried Dr. Pepys to him in the
year 1782, it appeared wholly impossible for any skill of the
physician or any strength of the patient to save him. He
was saved that time, however, by Sir Lucas’s prescriptions;
and less skill on one side, or less strength on the other, I am
morally certain, would not have been enough. He had,
however, possessed an athletic constitution, as he said the man
who dipped people in the sea at Brighthelmstone acknowledged; for
seeing Mr. Johnson swim, in the year 1766, “Why,
sir,” says the dipper, “you must have been a
stout-hearted gentleman forty years ago.”

Mr. Thrale and he used to laugh about that story very often:
but Garrick told a better, for he said that in their young days,
when some strolling players came to Lichfield, our friend had
fixed his place upon the stage, and got himself a chair
accordingly; which leaving for a few minutes, he found a man in
it at his return, who refused to give it back at the first
entreaty. Mr. Johnson, however, who did not think it worth
his while to make a second, took chair and man and all together,
and threw them all at once into the pit. I asked the Doctor
if this was a fact. “Garrick has not spoiled
it in the telling,” said he, “it is very near
true, to be sure.”

Mr. Beauclerc, too, related one day how on some occasion he
ordered two large mastiffs into his parlour, to show a friend who
was conversant in canine beauty and excellence how the dogs
quarrelled, and fastening on each other, alarmed all the company
except Johnson, who seizing one in one hand by the cuff of the
neck, the other in the other hand, said gravely, “Come,
gentlemen! where’s your difficulty? put one dog out at the
door, and I will show this fierce gentleman the way out of the
window:” which, lifting up the mastiff and the sash, he
contrived to do very expeditiously, and much to the satisfaction
of the affrighted company. We inquired as to the truth of
this curious recital. “The dogs have been somewhat
magnified, I believe, sir,” was the reply: “they
were, as I remember, two stout young pointers; but the story has
gained but little.”

One reason why Mr. Johnson’s memory was so particularly
exact, might be derived from his rigid attention to veracity;
being always resolved to relate every fact as it stood, he looked
even on the smaller parts of life with minute attention, and
remembered such passages as escape cursory and common
observers. “A story,” says he, “is a
specimen of human manners, and derives its sole value from its
truth. When Foote has told me something, I dismiss it from
my mind like a passing shadow: when Reynolds tells me something,
I consider myself as possessed of an idea the more.”

Mr. Johnson liked a frolic or a jest well enough, though he
had strange serious rules about it too: and very angry was he if
anybody offered to be merry when he was disposed to be
grave. “You have an ill-founded notion,” said
he, “that it is clever to turn matters off with a joke (as
the phrase is); whereas nothing produces enmity so certain as one
persons showing a disposition to be merry when another is
inclined to be either serious or displeased.”

One may gather from this how he felt when his Irish friend
Grierson, hearing him enumerate the qualities necessary to the
formation of a poet, began a comical parody upon his ornamented
harangue in praise of a cook, concluding with this observation,
that he who dressed a good dinner was a more excellent and a more
useful member of society than he who wrote a good poem.
“And in this opinion,” said Mr. Johnson in reply,
“all the dogs in the town will join you.”

Of this Mr. Grierson I have heard him relate many droll
stories, much to his advantage as a wit, together with some facts
more difficult to be accounted for; as avarice never was reckoned
among the vices of the laughing world. But Johnson’s
various life, and spirit of vigilance to learn and treasure up
every peculiarity of manner, sentiment, or general conduct, made
his company, when he chose to relate anecdotes of people he had
formerly known, exquisitely amusing and comical. It is
indeed inconceivable what strange occurrences he had seen, and
what surprising things he could tell when in a communicative
humour. It is by no means my business to relate memoirs of
his acquaintance; but it will serve to show the character of
Johnson himself, when I inform those who never knew him that no
man told a story with so good a grace, or knew so well what would
make an effect upon his auditors. When he raised
contributions for some distressed author, or wit in want, he
often made us all more than amends by diverting descriptions of
the lives they were then passing in corners unseen by anybody but
himself; and that odd old surgeon whom he kept in his house to
tend the out-pensioners, and of whom he said most truly and
sublimely that—

I have forgotten the year, but it could scarcely I think be
later than 1765 or 1766, that he was called abruptly from our
house after dinner, and returning in about three hours, said he
had been with an enraged author, whose landlady pressed him for
payment within doors, while the bailiffs beset him without; that
he was drinking himself drunk with Madeira to drown care, and
fretting over a novel which, when finished, was to be his whole
fortune; but he could not get it done for distraction, nor could
he step out of doors to offer it to sale. Mr. Johnson
therefore set away the bottle, and went to the bookseller,
recommending the performance, and desiring some immediate relief;
which when he brought back to the writer, he called the woman of
the house directly to partake of punch, and pass their time in
merriment.

It was not till ten years after, I dare say, that something in
Dr. Goldsmith’s behaviour struck me with an idea that he
was the very man, and then Johnson confessed it was so; the novel
was the charming “Vicar of Wakefield.”

There was a Mr. Boyce, too, who wrote some very elegant verses
printed in the magazines of five-and-twenty years ago, of whose
ingenuity and distress I have heard Dr. Johnson tell some curious
anecdotes, particularly that when he was almost perishing with
hunger, and some money was produced to purchase him a dinner, he
got a piece of roast beef, but could not eat it without ketchup,
and laid out the last half-guinea he possessed in truffles and
mushrooms, eating them in bed, too, for want of clothes, or even
a shirt to sit up in.

Another man, for whom he often begged, made as wild use of his
friend’s beneficence as these, spending in punch the
solitary guinea which had been brought him one morning; when
resolving to add another claimant to a share of the bowl, besides
a woman who always lived with him, and a footman who used to
carry out petitions for charity, he borrowed a chairman’s
watch, and pawning it for half-a-crown, paid a clergyman to marry
him to a fellow-lodger in the wretched house they all inhabited,
and got so drunk over the guinea bowl of punch the evening of his
wedding-day, that having many years lost the use of one leg, he
now contrived to fall from the top of the stairs to the bottom,
and break his arm, in which condition his companions left him to
call Mr. Johnson, who, relating the series of his tragi-comical
distresses obtained from the Literary Club a seasonable
relief.

Of that respectable society I have heard him speak in the
highest terms, and with a magnificent panegyric on each member,
when it consisted only of a dozen or fourteen friends; but as
soon as the necessity of enlarging it brought in new faces, and
took off from his confidence in the company, he grew less fond of
the meeting, and loudly proclaimed his carelessness who
might be admitted, when it was become a mere dinner club. I
think the original names, when I first heard him talk with
fervour of every member’s peculiar powers of instructing or
delighting mankind, were Sir John Hawkins, Mr. Burke, Mr.
Langton, Mr. Beauclerc, Dr. Percy, Dr. Nugent, Dr. Goldsmith, Sir
Robert Chambers, Mr. Dyer, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he
called their Romulus, or said somebody else of the company called
him so, which was more likely: but this was, I believe, in the
year 1775 or 1776. It was a supper meeting then, and I
fancy Dr. Nugent ordered an omelet sometimes on a Friday or
Saturday night; for I remember Mr. Johnson felt very painful
sensations at the sight of that dish soon after his death, and
cried, “Ah, my poor dear friend! I shall never eat
omelet with thee again!” quite in an agony.
The truth is, nobody suffered more from pungent sorrow at a
friend’s death than Johnson, though he would suffer no one
else to complain of their losses in the same way;
“for,” says he, “we must either outlive our
friends, you know, or our friends must outlive us; and I see no
man that would hesitate about the choice.”

Mr. Johnson loved late hours extremely, or more properly hated
early ones. Nothing was more terrifying to him than the
idea of retiring to bed, which he never would call going to rest,
or suffer another to call so. “I lie down,”
said he, “that my acquaintance may sleep; but I lie down to
endure oppressive misery, and soon rise again to pass the night
in anxiety and pain.” By this pathetic manner, which
no one ever possessed in so eminent a degree, he used to shock me
from quitting his company, till I hurt my own health not a little
by sitting up with him when I was myself far from well; nor was
it an easy matter to oblige him even by compliance, for he always
maintained that no one forbore their own gratifications for the
sake of pleasing another, and if one did sit up it was
probably to amuse oneself. Some right, however, he
certainly had to say so, as he made his company exceedingly
entertaining when he had once forced one, by his vehement
lamentations and piercing reproofs, not to quit the room, but to
sit quietly and make tea for him, as I often did in London till
four o’clock in the morning. At Streatham, indeed, I
managed better, having always some friend who was kind enough to
engage him in talk, and favour my retreat.

The first time I ever saw this extraordinary man was in the
year 1764, when Mr. Murphy, who had been long the friend and
confidential intimate of Mr. Thrale, persuaded him to wish for
Johnson’s conversation, extolling it in terms which that of
no other person could have deserved, till we were only in doubt
how to obtain his company, and find an excuse for the
invitation. The celebrity of Mr. Woodhouse, a shoemaker,
whose verses were at that time the subject of common discourse,
soon afforded a pretence, and Mr. Murphy brought Johnson to meet
him, giving me general cautions not to be surprised at his
figure, dress, or behaviour. What I recollect best of the
day’s talk was his earnestly recommending Addison’s
works to Mr. Woodhouse as a model for imitation.
“Give nights and days, sir,” said he, “to the
study of Addison, if you mean either to be a good writer, or what
is more worth, an honest man.” When I saw something
like the same expression in his criticism on that author, lately
published, I put him in mind of his past injunctions to the young
poet, to which he replied, “that he wished the shoemaker
might have remembered them as well.” Mr. Johnson
liked his new acquaintance so much, however, that, from that time
he dined with us every Thursday through the winter, and in the
autumn of the next year he followed us to Brighthelmstone, whence
we were gone before his arrival; so he was disappointed and
enraged, and wrote us a letter expressive of anger, which we were
very desirous to pacify, and to obtain his company again, if
possible. Mr. Murphy brought him back to us again very
kindly, and from that time his visits grew more frequent, till in
the year 1766 his health, which he had always complained of, grew
so exceedingly bad, that he could not stir out of his room in the
court he inhabited for many weeks together—I think
months.

Mr. Thrale’s attentions and my own now became so
acceptable to him, that he often lamented to us the horrible
condition of his mind, which he said was nearly distracted; and
though he charged us to make him odd solemn promises of
secrecy on so strange a subject, yet when we waited on him one
morning, and heard him, in the most pathetic terms, beg the
prayers of Dr. Delap, who had left him as we came in, I felt
excessively affected with grief, and well remember my husband
involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from
provocation at hearing a man so wildly proclaim what he could at
last persuade no one to believe, and what, if true, would have
been so very unfit to reveal.

Mr. Thrale went away soon after, leaving me with him, and
bidding me prevail on him to quit his close habitation in the
court and come with us to Streatham, where I undertook the care
of his health, and had the honour and happiness of contributing
to its restoration. This task, though distressing enough
sometimes, would have been less so had not my mother and he
disliked one another extremely, and teased me often with perverse
opposition, petty contentions, and mutual complaints. Her
superfluous attention to such accounts of the foreign politics as
are transmitted to us by the daily prints, and her willingness to
talk on subjects he could not endure, began the aversion; and
when, by the peculiarity of his style, she found out that he
teased her by writing in the newspapers concerning battles and
plots which had no existence, only to feed her with new accounts
of the division of Poland, perhaps, or the disputes between the
States of Russia and Turkey, she was exceedingly angry, to be
sure, and scarcely, I think, forgave the offence till the
domestic distresses of the year 1772 reconciled them to and
taught them the true value of each other, excellent as they
both were, far beyond the excellence of any other man and
woman I ever yet saw. As her conduct, too, extorted his
truest esteem, her cruel illness excited all his tenderness, nor
was the sight of beauty, scarce to be subdued by disease, and
wit, flashing through the apprehension of evil, a scene which Dr.
Johnson could see without sensibility. He acknowledged
himself improved by her piety, and astonished at her fortitude,
and hung over her bed with the affection of a parent, and the
reverence of a son. Nor did it give me less pleasure to see
her sweet mind cleared of all its latent prejudices, and left at
liberty to admire and applaud that force of thought and
versatility of genius, that comprehensive soul and benevolent
heart, which attracted and commanded veneration from all, but
inspired peculiar sensations of delight mixed with reverence in
those who, like her, had the opportunity to observe these
qualities stimulated by gratitude, and actuated by
friendship. When Mr. Thrale’s perplexities disturbed
his peace, dear Dr. Johnson left him scarce a moment, and tried
every artifice to amuse as well as every argument to console him:
nor is it more possible to describe than to forget his prudent,
his pious attentions towards the man who had some years before
certainly saved his valuable life, perhaps his reason, by half
obliging him to change the foul air of Fleet Street for the
wholesome breezes of the Sussex Downs.

The epitaph engraved on my mother’s monument shows how
deserving she was of general applause. I asked Johnson why
he named her person before her mind. He said it was
“because everybody could judge of the one, and but few of
the other.”

Mr. Murphy, who admired her talents and delighted in her
company, did me the favour to paraphrase this elegant inscription
in verses which I fancy have never yet been published. His
fame has long been out of my power to increase as a poet: as a
man of sensibility perhaps these lines may set him higher than he
now stands. I remember with gratitude the friendly tears
which prevented him from speaking as he put them into my
hand.

Near
this place
Are deposited the remains
ofHester Maria,
The daughter of Sir Thomas Cotton of Combermere,
in the county of Cheshire, Bart., the wife of
John Salusbury,
of the county of Flint, Esquire. She was
born in the year 1707, married in 1739, and died in 1773.

A pleasing form, where every grace combined,
With genius blest, a pure enlightened mind;
Benevolence on all that smiles bestowed,
A heart that for her friends with love o’erflowed:
In language skilled, by science formed to please,
Her mirth was wit, her gravity was ease.
Graceful in all, the happy mien she knew,
Which even to virtue gives the limits due;
Whate’er employed her, that she seemed to choose,
Her house, her friends, her business, or the muse.
Admired and loved, the theme of general praise,
All to such virtue wished a length of days.
But sad reverse! with slow-consuming pains,
Th’ envenomed cancer revelled in her veins;
Preyed on her spirits—stole each power away;
Gradual she sank, yet smiling in decay;
She smiled in hope, by sore affliction tried,
And in that hope the pious Christian died.

The following epitaph on Mr. Thrale, who has now a monument
close by hers in Streatham Church, I have seen printed and
commended in Maty’s Review for April, 1784; and a friend
has favoured me with the translation:—

Here are deposited the remains ofHenry Thrale,
Who managed all his concerns in the present
world, public and private, in such a manner
as to leave many wishing he had continued
longer in it;
And all that related to a future world,
as if he had been sensible how short a time he
was to continue in this.
Simple, open, and uniform in his manners,
his conduct was without either art or affectation.
In the senate steadily attentive to the true interests
of his king and country,
He looked down with contempt on the clamours
of the multitude:
Though engaged in a very extensive business,
He found some time to apply to polite literature
And was ever ready to assist his friends
labouring under any difficulties,
with his advice, his influence, and his purse.
To his friends, acquaintance, and guests,
he behaved with such sweetness of manners
as to attach them all to his person:
So happy in his conversation with them,
as to please all, though he flattered none.
He was born in the year 1724, and died in 1781.
In the same tomb lie interred his father,
Ralph Thrale, a man of vigour and activity,
And his only son Henry, who died before his father,
Aged ten years.

Thus a happy and opulent family,
Raised by the grandfather, and augmented by the
father, became extinguished with the grandson.
Go, Reader!
And reflecting on the vicissitudes of
all human affairs,
Meditate on eternity.

I never recollect to have heard that Dr. Johnson wrote
inscriptions for any sepulchral stones except Dr.
Goldsmith’s, in Westminster Abbey, and these two in
Streatham Church. He made four lines once on the death of
poor Hogarth, which were equally true and pleasing. I know
not why Garrick’s were preferred to them.

“The hand of him here torpid lies,
That drew th’ essential form of grace;
Here clos’d in death th’ attentive eyes,
That saw the manners in the face.”

Mr. Hogarth, among the variety of kindnesses shown to me when
I was too young to have a proper sense of them, was used to be
very earnest that I should obtain the acquaintance, and if
possible the friendship, of Dr. Johnson, whose conversation was,
to the talk of other men, “like Titian’s painting
compared to Hudson’s,” he said: “but
don’t you tell people, now, that I say so,” continued
he, “for the connoisseurs and I are at war, you know; and
because I hate them, they think I hate
Titian—and let them!” Many were indeed
the lectures I used to have in my very early days from dear Mr.
Hogarth, whose regard for my father induced him, perhaps, to take
notice of his little girl, and give her some odd particular
directions about dress, dancing, and many other matters,
interesting now only because they were his. As he made all
his talents, however, subservient to the great purposes of
morality, and the earnest desire he had to mend mankind, his
discourse commonly ended in an ethical dissertation, and a
serious charge to me, never to forget his picture of the
“Lady’s last Stake.” Of Dr. Johnson, when
my father and he were talking together about him one day,
“That man,” says Hogarth, “is not contented
with believing the Bible, but he fairly resolves, I think, to
believe nothing but the Bible. Johnson,” added
he, “though so wise a fellow, is more like King David than
King Solomon; for he says in his haste that ‘all men are
liars.’” This charge, as I afterwards came to
know, was but too well founded. Mr. Johnson’s
incredulity amounted almost to disease, and I have seen it
mortify his companions exceedingly. But the truth is, Mr.
Thrale had a very powerful influence over the Doctor, and could
make him suppress many rough answers. He could likewise
prevail on him to change his shirt, his coat, or his plate,
almost before it came indispensably necessary to the comfort of
his friends. But as I never had any ascendency at all over
Mr. Johnson, except just in the things that concerned his health,
it grew extremely perplexing and difficult to live in the house
with him when the master of it was no more; the worse, indeed,
because his dislikes grew capricious; and he could scarce bear to
have anybody come to the house whom it was absolutely necessary
for me to see. Two gentlemen, I perfectly well remember,
dining with us at Streatham in the summer, 1782, when
Elliot’s brave defence of Gibraltar was a subject of common
discourse, one of these men naturally enough began some talk
about red-hot balls thrown with surprising dexterity and effect,
which Dr. Johnson having listened some time to, “I would
advise you, sir,” said he, with a cold sneer, “never
to relate this story again; you really can scarce imagine how
very poor a figure you make in the telling of
it.” Our guest being bred a Quaker, and, I believe, a
man of an extremely gentle disposition, needed no more reproofs
for the same folly; so if he ever did speak again, it was in a
low voice to the friend who came with him. The check was
given before dinner, and after coffee I left the room. When
in the evening, however, our companions were returned to London,
and Mr. Johnson and myself were left alone, with only our usual
family about us, “I did not quarrel with those Quaker
fellows,” said he, very seriously. “You did
perfectly right,” replied I, “for they gave you no
cause of offence.” “No offence!” returned
he, with an altered voice; “and is it nothing, then, to sit
whispering together when I am present, without ever
directing their discourse towards me, or offering me a share in
the conversation?” “That was because you
frighted him who spoke first about those hot balls.”
“Why, madam, if a creature is neither capable of giving
dignity to falsehood, nor willing to remain contented with the
truth, he deserves no better treatment.”

Mr. Johnson’s fixed incredulity of everything he heard,
and his little care to conceal that incredulity, was teasing
enough, to be sure; and I saw Mr. Sharp was pained exceedingly
when relating the history of a hurricane that happened about that
time in the West Indies, where, for aught I know, he had himself
lost some friends too, he observed Dr. Johnson believed not a
syllable of the account. “For ’tis so
easy,” says he, “for a man to fill his mouth with a
wonder, and run about telling the lie before it can be detected,
that I have no heart to believe hurricanes easily raised by the
first inventor, and blown forwards by thousands
more.” I asked him once if he believed the story of
the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake when it first
happened. “Oh! not for six months,” said he,
“at least. I did think that story too dreadful
to be credited, and can hardly yet persuade myself that it was
true to the full extent we all of us have heard.”

Among the numberless people, however, whom I heard him grossly
and flatly contradict, I never yet saw any one who did not take
it patiently excepting Dr. Burney, from whose habitual softness
of manners I little expected such an exertion of spirit; the
event was as little to be expected. Mr. Johnson asked his
pardon generously and genteelly, and when he left the room, rose
up to shake hands with him, that they might part in peace.
On another occasion, when he had violently provoked Mr. Pepys, in
a different but perhaps not a less offensive manner, till
something much too like a quarrel was grown up between them, the
moment he was gone, “Now,” says Dr. Johnson,
“is Pepys gone home hating me, who love him better than I
did before. He spoke in defence of his dead friend; but
though I hope I spoke better who spoke against him, yet
all my eloquence will gain me nothing but an honest man for my
enemy!” He did not, however, cordially love Mr.
Pepys, though he respected his abilities. “I know the
dog was a scholar,” said he when they had been disputing
about the classics for three hours together one morning at
Streatham, “but that he had so much taste and so much
knowledge I did not believe. I might have taken
Barnard’s word though, for Barnard would not
lie.”

We had got a little French print among us at Brighthelmstone,
in November, 1782, of some people skating, with these lines
written under:—

He was, however, most exceedingly enraged when he knew that in
the course of the season I had asked half-a-dozen acquaintance to
do the same thing; and said, “it was a piece of treachery,
and done to make everybody else look little when compared to my
favourite friends the Pepyses, whose translations were
unquestionably the best.” I will insert them, because
he did say so. This is the distich given me by Sir
Lucas, to whom I owe more solid obligations, no less than the
power of thanking him for the life he saved, and whose least
valuable praise is the correctness of his taste:—

“O’er the ice as o’er pleasure
you lightly should glide,
Both have gulfs which their flattering surfaces hide.”

This other more serious one was written by his
brother:—

“Swift o’er the level how the skaters
slide,
And skim the glitt’ring surface as they go:
Thus o’er life’s specious pleasures lightly glide,
But pause not, press not on the gulf
below.”

Though thus uncommonly ready both to give and take offence,
Mr. Johnson had many rigid maxims concerning the necessity of
continued softness and compliance of disposition: and when I once
mentioned Shenstone’s idea that some little quarrel among
lovers, relations, and friends was useful, and contributed to
their general happiness upon the whole, by making the soul feel
her elastic force, and return to the beloved object with renewed
delight: “Why, what a pernicious maxim is this now,”
cries Johnson, “all quarrels ought to be avoided
studiously, particularly conjugal ones, as no one can possibly
tell where they may end; besides that lasting dislike is often
the consequence of occasional disgust, and that the cup of life
is surely bitter enough without squeezing in the hateful rind of
resentment.” It was upon something like the same
principle, and from his general hatred of refinement, that when I
told him how Dr. Collier, in order to keep the servants in humour
with his favourite dog, by seeming rough with the animal himself
on many occasions, and crying out, “Why will nobody knock
this cur’s brains out?” meant to conciliate their
tenderness towards Pompey; he returned me for answer, “that
the maxim was evidently false, and founded on ignorance of human
life: that the servants would kick the dog sooner for having
obtained such a sanction to their severity. And I
once,” added he, “chid my wife for beating the cat
before the maid, who will now,” said I, “treat puss
with cruelty, perhaps, and plead her mistress’s
example.”

I asked him upon this if he ever disputed with his wife?
(I had heard that he loved her passionately.)
“Perpetually,” said he: “my wife had a
particular reverence for cleanliness, and desired the praise of
neatness in her dress and furniture, as many ladies do, till they
become troublesome to their best friends, slaves to their own
besoms, and only sigh for the hour of sweeping their husbands out
of the house as dirt and useless lumber. ‘A clean
floor is so comfortable,’ she would say sometimes,
by way of twitting; till at last I told her that I thought we had
had talk enough about the floor, we would now have a touch
at the ceiling.”

On another occasion I have heard him blame her for a fault
many people have, of setting the miseries of their neighbours
half unintentionally, half wantonly before their eyes, showing
them the bad side of their profession, situation, etc. He
said, “She would lament the dependence of pupilage to a
young heir, etc., and once told a waterman who rowed her along
the Thames in a wherry, that he was no happier than a
galley-slave, one being chained to the oar by authority, the
other by want. I had, however,” said he, laughing,
“the wit to get her daughter on my side always before we
began the dispute. She read comedy better than anybody he
ever heard,” he said; “in tragedy she mouthed too
much.”

Garrick told Mr. Thrale, however, that she was a little
painted puppet, of no value at all, and quite disguised with
affectation, full of odd airs of rural elegance; and he made out
some comical scenes, by mimicking her in a dialogue he pretended
to have overheard. I do not know whether he meant such
stuff to be believed or no, it was so comical; nor did I indeed
ever see him represent her ridiculously, though my husband
did. The intelligence I gained of her from old Levett was
only perpetual illness and perpetual opium. The picture I
found of her at Lichfield was very pretty, and her daughter, Mrs.
Lucy Porter, said it was like. Mr. Johnson has told me that
her hair was eminently beautiful, quite blonde, like that of a
baby; but that she fretted about the colour, and was always
desirous to dye it black, which he very judiciously hindered her
from doing. His account of their wedding we used to think
ludicrous enough. “I was riding to church,”
says Johnson, “and she following on another single
horse. She hung back, however, and I turned about to see
whether she could get her steed along, or what was the
matter. I had, however, soon occasion to see it was only
coquetry, and that I despised, so quickening my pace a
little, she mended hers; but I believe there was a tear or
two—pretty dear creature!”

Johnson loved his dinner exceedingly, and has often said in my
hearing, perhaps for my edification, “that wherever the
dinner is ill got there is poverty or there is avarice, or there
is stupidity; in short, the family is somehow grossly wrong:
for,” continued he, “a man seldom thinks with more
earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner, and if he
cannot get that well dressed, he should be suspected of
inaccuracy in other things.” One day, when he was
speaking upon the subject, I asked him if he ever huffed his wife
about his dinner? “So often,” replied he,
“that at last she called to me, and said, ‘Nay, hold,
Mr. Johnson, and do not make a farce of thanking God for a dinner
which in a few minutes you will protest not
eatable.’”

When any disputes arose between our married acquaintance,
however, Mr. Johnson always sided with the husband,
“whom,” he said, “the woman had probably
provoked so often, she scarce knew when or how she had disobliged
him first. Women,” says Dr. Johnson, “give
great offence by a contemptuous spirit of non-compliance on petty
occasions. The man calls his wife to walk with him in the
shade, and she feels a strange desire just at that moment to sit
in the sun: he offers to read her a play, or sing her a song, and
she calls the children in to disturb them, or advises him to
seize that opportunity of settling the family accounts.
Twenty such tricks will the faithfullest wife in the world not
refuse to play, and then look astonished when the fellow fetches
in a mistress. Boarding-schools were established,”
continued he, “for the conjugal quiet of the parents.
The two partners cannot agree which child to fondle, nor how to
fondle them, so they put the young ones to school, and remove the
cause of contention. The little girl pokes her head, the
mother reproves her sharply. ‘Do not mind your
mamma,’ says the father, ‘my dear, but do your own
way.’ The mother complains to me of this.
‘Madam,’ said I, ‘your husband is right all the
while; he is with you but two hours of the day, perhaps, and then
you tease him by making the child cry. Are not ten hours
enough for tuition? and are the hours of pleasure so frequent in
life, that when a man gets a couple of quiet ones to spend in
familiar chat with his wife, they must be poisoned by petty
mortifications? Put missy to school; she will learn to hold
her head like her neighbours, and you will no longer torment your
family for want of other talk.’”.

The vacuity of life had at some early period of his life
struck so forcibly on the mind of Mr. Johnson, that it became by
repeated impression his favourite hypothesis, and the general
tenor of his reasonings commonly ended there, wherever they might
begin. Such things, therefore, as other philosophers often
attribute to various and contradictory causes, appeared to him
uniform enough; all was done to fill up the time, upon his
principle. I used to tell him that it was like the
clown’s answer in As You Like It, of “Oh, lord,
sir!” for that it suited every occasion. One man, for
example, was profligate and wild, as we call it, followed the
girls, or sat still at the gaming-table. “Why, life
must be filled up,” says Johnson, “and the man who is
not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with
such as his senses can afford.” Another was a
hoarder. “Why, a fellow must do something; and what,
so easy to a narrow mind as hoarding halfpence till they turn
into sixpences.” Avarice was a vice against which,
however, I never much heard Mr. Johnson declaim, till one
represented it to him connected with cruelty, or some such
disgraceful companion. “Do not,” said he,
“discourage your children from hoarding if they have a
taste to it: whoever lays up his penny rather than part with it
for a cake, at least is not the slave of gross appetite, and
shows besides a preference always to be esteemed, of the future
to the present moment. Such a mind may be made a good one;
but the natural spendthrift, who grasps his pleasures greedily
and coarsely, and cares for nothing but immediate indulgence, is
very little to be valued above a negro.” We talked of
Lady Tavistock, who grieved herself to death for the loss of her
husband—“She was rich, and wanted employment,”
says Johnson, “so she cried till she lost all power of
restraining her tears: other women are forced to outlive their
husbands, who were just as much beloved, depend on it; but they
have no time for grief: and I doubt not, if we had put my Lady
Tavistock into a small chandler’s shop, and given her a
nurse-child to tend, her life would have been saved. The
poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental
sorrow.” We were speaking of a gentleman who loved
his friend—“Make him Prime Minister,” says
Johnson, “and see how long his friend will be
remembered.” But he had a rougher answer for me, when
I commended a sermon preached by an intimate acquaintance of our
own at the trading end of the town. “What was the
subject, madam?” says Dr. Johnson. “Friendship,
sir,” replied I. “Why, now, is it not strange
that a wise man, like our dear little Evans, should take it in
his head to preach on such a subject, in a place where no one can
be thinking of it?” “Why, what are they
thinking upon, sir?” said I. “Why, the men are
thinking on their money, I suppose, and the women are thinking of
their mops.”

Dr. Johnson’s knowledge and esteem of what we call low
or coarse life was indeed prodigious; and he did not like that
the upper ranks should be dignified with the name of the
world. Sir Joshua Reynolds said one day that nobody
wore laced coats now; and that once everybody wore
them. “See, now,” says Johnson, “how
absurd that is; as if the bulk of mankind consisted of fine
gentlemen that came to him to sit for their pictures. If
every man who wears a laced coat (that he can pay for) was
extirpated, who would miss them?” With all this
haughty contempt of gentility, no praise was more welcome to Dr.
Johnson than that which said he had the notions or manners of a
gentleman: which character I have heard him define with accuracy,
and describe with elegance. “Officers,” he
said, “were falsely supposed to have the carriage of
gentlemen; whereas no profession left a stronger brand behind it
than that of a soldier; and it was the essence of a
gentleman’s character to bear the visible mark of no
profession whatever.” He once named Mr. Berenger as
the standard of true elegance; but some one objecting that he too
much resembled the gentleman in Congreve’s comedies, Mr.
Johnson said, “We must fix them upon the famous Thomas
Hervey, whose manners were polished even to acuteness and
brilliancy, though he lost but little in solid power of
reasoning, and in genuine force of mind.” Mr. Johnson
had, however, an avowed and scarcely limited partiality for all
who bore the name or boasted the alliance of an Aston or a
Hervey; and when Mr. Thrale once asked him which had been the
happiest period of his past life? he replied, “It was that
year in which he spent one whole evening with M---y As--n.
That, indeed,” said he, “was not happiness, it was
rapture; but the thoughts of it sweetened the whole
year.” I must add that the evening alluded to was not
passed tete-a-tete, but in a select company, of which the present
Lord Killmorey was one. “Molly,” says Dr.
Johnson, “was a beauty and a scholar, and a wit and a Whig;
and she talked all in praise of liberty: and so I made this
epigram upon her. She was the loveliest creature I ever
saw!!!

“Persuasions to freedom fall oddly from
you;
If freedom we seek—fair Maria, adieu!”

“It will do well enough,” replied he, “but
it is translated by a lady, and the ladies never loved M---y
As--n.” I asked him what his wife thought of this
attachment? “She was jealous, to be sure,” said
he, “and teased me sometimes when I would let her; and one
day, as a fortune-telling gipsy passed us when we were walking
out in company with two or three friends in the country, she made
the wench look at my hand, but soon repented her curiosity;
‘for,’ says the gipsy, ‘your heart is divided,
sir, between a Betty and a Molly: Betty loves you best, but you
take most delight in Molly’s company.’ When I
turned about to laugh, I saw my wife was crying. Pretty
charmer! she had no reason!”

It was, I believe, long after the currents of life had driven
him to a great distance from this lady, that he spent much of his
time with Mrs. F-tzh--b--t, of whom he always spoke with esteem
and tenderness, and with a veneration very difficult to
deserve. “That woman,” said he, “loved
her husband as we hope and desire to be loved by our guardian
angel. F-tzh--b--t was a gay, good-humoured fellow,
generous of his money and of his meat, and desirous of nothing
but cheerful society among people distinguished in some
way, in any way, I think; for Rousseau and St. Austin
would have been equally welcome to his table and to his
kindness. The lady, however, was of another way of
thinking: her first care was to preserve her husband’s soul
from corruption; her second, to keep his estate entire for their
children: and I owed my good reception in the family to the idea
she had entertained, that I was fit company for F-tzh--b--t, whom
I loved extremely. ‘They dare not,’ said she,
‘swear, and take other conversation-liberties before
you.’” I asked if her husband returned
her regard? “He felt her influence too
powerfully,” replied Mr. Johnson; “no man will be
fond of what forces him daily to feel himself inferior. She
stood at the door of her paradise in Derbyshire, like the angel
with a flaming sword, to keep the devil at a distance. But
she was not immortal, poor dear! she died, and her husband felt
at once afflicted and released.” I inquired if she
was handsome? “She would have been handsome for a
queen,” replied the panegyrist; “her beauty had more
in it of majesty than of attraction, more of the dignity of
virtue than the vivacity of wit.” The friend of this
lady, Miss B--thby, succeeded her in the management of Mr.
F-tzh--b--t’s family, and in the esteem of Dr. Johnson,
though he told me she pushed her piety to bigotry, her devotion
to enthusiasm, that she somewhat disqualified herself for the
duties of this life, by her perpetual aspirations after
the next. Such was, however, the purity of her mind,
he said, and such the graces of her manner, that Lord Lyttelton
and he used to strive for her preference with an emulation that
occasioned hourly disgust, and ended in lasting animosity.
“You may see,” said he to me, when the
“Poets’ Lives” were printed, “that dear
B--thby is at my heart still. She would delight in
that fellow Lyttelton’s company though, all that I could
do; and I cannot forgive even his memory the preference given by
a mind like hers.” I have heard Baretti say that when
this lady died, Dr. Johnson was almost distracted with his grief,
and that the friends about him had much ado to calm the violence
of his emotion. Dr. Taylor, too, related once to Mr. Thrale
and me, that when he lost his wife, the negro Francis ran away,
though in the middle of the night, to Westminster, to fetch Dr.
Taylor to his master, who was all but wild with excess of sorrow,
and scarce knew him when he arrived. After some minutes,
however, the Doctor proposed their going to prayers, as the only
rational method of calming the disorder this misfortune had
occasioned in both their spirits. Time, and resignation to
the will of God, cured every breach in his heart before I made
acquaintance with him, though he always persisted in saying he
never rightly recovered the loss of his wife. It is in
allusion to her that he records the observation of a female
critic, as he calls her, in Gay’s “Life;” and
the lady of great beauty and elegance, mentioned in the
criticisms upon Pope’s epitaphs, was Miss Molly
Aston. The person spoken of in his strictures upon
Young’s poetry is the writer of these anecdotes, to whom he
likewise addressed the following verses when he was in the Isle
of Skye with Mr. Boswell. The letters written in his
journey, I used to tell him, were better than the printed book;
and he was not displeased at my having taken the pains to copy
them all over. Here is the Latin ode:—

On another occasion I can boast verses from Dr. Johnson.
As I went into his room the morning of my birthday once, and said
to him, “Nobody sends me any verses now, because I am
five-and-thirty years old, and Stella was fed with them till
forty-six, I remember.” My being just recovered from
illness and confinement will account for the manner in which he
burst out, suddenly, for so he did without the least previous
hesitation whatsoever, and without having entertained the
smallest intention towards it half a minute before:

“Oft in danger, yet
alive,
We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive
Life to stop at thirty-five,
Time his hours should never drive
O’er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five.
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five:
For howe’er we boast and strive,
Life declines from thirty-five.
He that ever hopes to thrive
Must begin by thirty-five;
And all who wisely wish to wive
Must look on Thrale at thirty-five.”

“And now,” said he, as I was writing them down,
“you may see what it is to come for poetry to a
dictionary-maker; you may observe that the rhymes run in
alphabetical order exactly.” And so they do.

Mr. Johnson did indeed possess an almost Tuscan power of
improvisation. When he called to my daughter, who was
consulting with a friend about a new gown and dressed hat she
thought of wearing to an assembly, thus suddenly, while she hoped
he was not listening to their conversation—

“Wear the gown and wear the hat,
Snatch thy pleasures while they last;
Hadst thou nine lives like a cat,
Soon those nine lives would be past.”

It is impossible to deny to such little sallies the power of
the Florentines, who do not permit their verses to be ever
written down, though they often deserve it, because, as they
express it, Cosi se perde-rebbe la poca gloria.

As for translations, we used to make him sometimes run off
with one or two in a good humour. He was praising this song
of Metastasio:—

“Would you hope to gain my heart,
Bid your teasing doubts depart;
He who blindly trusts, will find
Faith from every generous mind:
He who still expects deceit,
Only teaches how to cheat.”

Mr. Baretti coaxed him likewise one day at Streatham out of a
translation of Emirena’s speech to the false courtier
Aquileius, and it is probably printed before now, as I think two
or three people took copies; but perhaps it has slipped their
memories.

“Grown old in courts, thou art not surely one
Who keeps the rigid rules of ancient honour;
Well skilled to soothe a foe with looks of kindness,
To sink the fatal precipice before him,
And then lament his fall with seeming friendship:
Open to all, true only to thyself,
Thou know’st those arts which blast with envious praise,
Which aggravate a fault with feigned excuses,
And drive discountenanced virtue from the throne;
That leave blame of rigour to the prince,
And of his every gift usurp the merit;
That hide in seeming zeal a wicked purpose,
And only build upon another’s ruin.”

These characters Dr. Johnson, however, did not delight in
reading, or in hearing of: he always maintained that the world
was not half so wicked as it was represented; and he might very
well continue in that opinion, as he resolutely drove from him
every story that could make him change it; and when Mr.
Bickerstaff’s flight confirmed the report of his guilt, and
my husband said, in answer to Johnson’s astonishment, that
he had long been a suspected man: “By those who look close
to the ground, dirt will be seen, sir,” was the lofty
reply. “I hope I see things from a greater
distance.”

His desire to go abroad, particularly to see Italy, was very
great; and he had a longing wish, too, to leave some Latin verses
at the Grand Chartreux. He loved, indeed, the very act of
travelling, and I cannot tell how far one might have taken him in
a carriage before he would have wished for refreshment. He
was therefore in some respects an admirable companion on the
road, as he piqued himself upon feeling no inconvenience, and on
despising no accommodations. On the other hand, however, he
expected no one else to feel any, and felt exceedingly inflamed
with anger if any one complained of the rain, the sun, or the
dust. “How,” said he, “do other people
bear them?” As for general uneasiness, or complaints
of lone confinement in a carriage, he considered all lamentations
on their account as proofs of an empty head, and a tongue
desirous to talk without materials of conversation.
“A mill that goes without grist,” said he, “is
as good a companion as such creatures.”

I pitied a friend before him, who had a whining wife that
found everything painful to her, and nothing pleasing.
“He does not know that she whimpers,” says Johnson;
“when a door has creaked for a fortnight together, you may
observe—the master will scarcely give sixpence to get it
oiled.”

Of another lady, more insipid than offensive, I once heard him
say, “She has some softness indeed, but so has a
pillow.” And when one observed, in reply, that her
husband’s fidelity and attachment were exemplary,
notwithstanding this low account at which her perfections were
rated—“Why, sir,” cries the Doctor,
“being married to those sleepy-souled women is just like
playing at cards for nothing: no passion is excited, and the time
is filled up. I do not, however, envy a fellow one of those
honeysuckle wives for my part, as they are but creepers at
best, and commonly destroy the tree they so tenderly cling
about.”

For a lady of quality, since dead, who received us at her
husband’s seat in Wales with less attention than he had
long been accustomed to, he had a rougher denunciation.
“That woman,” cries Johnson, “is like sour
small-beer, the beverage of her table, and produce of the
wretched country she lives in: like that, she could never have
been a good thing, and even that bad thing is
spoiled.” This was in the same vein of asperity, and
I believe with something like the same provocation, that he
observed of a Scotch lady, “that she resembled a dead
nettle; were she alive,” said he, “she would
sting.”

Mr. Johnson’s hatred of the Scotch is so well known, and
so many of his bons mots expressive of that hatred have been
already repeated in so many books and pamphlets, that ’tis
perhaps scarcely worth while to write down the conversation
between him and a friend of that nation who always resides in
London, and who at his return from the Hebrides asked him, with a
firm tone of voice, “What he thought of his
country?” “That it is a very vile country, to
be sure, sir,” returned for answer Dr. Johnson.
“Well, sir!” replies the other, somewhat mortified,
“God made it.” “Certainly He did,”
answers Mr. Johnson again, “but we must always remember
that He made it for Scotchmen, and comparisons are odious, Mr.
S---; but God made hell.”

Dr. Johnson did not, I think, much delight in that kind of
conversation which consists in telling stories.
“Everybody,” said he, “tells stories of me, and
I tell stories of nobody. I do not recollect,” added
he, “that I have ever told you, that have been
always favourites, above three stories; but I hope I do not play
the Old Fool, and force people to hear uninteresting narratives,
only because I once was diverted with them myself.”
He was, however, no enemy to that sort of talk from the famous
Mr. Foote, “whose happiness of manner in relating was
such,” he said, “as subdued arrogance and roused
stupidity. His stories were truly like those of
Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost, so very
attractive—

‘That aged ears played truant with his
tales,
And younger hearings were quite ravished,
So sweet and voluble was his discourse.’

Of all conversers, however,” added he, “the late
Hawkins Browne was the most delightful with whom I ever was in
company: his talk was at once so elegant, so apparently artless,
so pure, so pleasing, it seemed a perpetual stream of sentiment,
enlivened by gaiety, and sparkling with images.” When
I asked Dr. Johnson who was the best man he had ever known?
“Psalmanazar,” was the unexpected reply. He
said, likewise, “that though a native of France, as his
friend imagined, he possessed more of the English language than
any one of the other foreigners who had separately fallen in his
way.” Though there was much esteem, however, there
was, I believe, but little confidence between them; they
conversed merely about general topics, religion and learning, of
which both were undoubtedly stupendous examples; and, with regard
to true Christian perfection, I have heard Johnson say,
“That George Psalmanazar’s piety, penitence, and
virtue exceeded almost what we read as wonderful even in the
lives of saints.”

I forget in what year it was this extraordinary person lived
and died at a house in Old Street, where Mr. Johnson was witness
to his talents and virtues, and to his final preference of the
Church of England, after having studied, disgraced, and adorned
so many modes of worship. The name he went by was not
supposed by his friend to be that of his family, but all
inquiries were vain. His reasons for concealing his
original were penitentiary; he deserved no other name than that
of the impostor, he said. That portion of the Universal
History which was written by him does not seem to me to be
composed with peculiar spirit, but all traces of the wit and the
wanderer were probably worn out before he undertook the
work. His pious and patient endurance of a tedious illness,
ending in an exemplary death, confirmed the strong impression his
merit had made upon the mind of Mr. Johnson. “It is
so very difficult,” said he, always, “for a
sick man not to be a scoundrel. Oh! set the pillows soft,
here is Mr. Grumbler a-coming. Ah! let no air in for the
world, Mr. Grumbler will be here presently.”

This perpetual preference is so offensive, where the
privileges of sickness are, besides, supported by wealth, and
nourished by dependence, that one cannot much wonder that a rough
mind is revolted by them. It was, however, at once comical
and touchant (as the French call it), to observe Mr. Johnson so
habitually watchful against this sort of behaviour, that he was
often ready to suspect himself of it; and when one asked him
gently, how he did?—“Ready to become a scoundrel,
madam,” would commonly be the answer; “with a little
more spoiling you will, I think, make me a complete
rascal!”

His desire of doing good was not, however, lessened by his
aversion to a sick chamber. He would have made an ill man
well by any expense or fatigue of his own, sooner than any of the
canters. Canter, indeed, was he none: he would forget to
ask people after the health of their nearest relations, and say
in excuse, “That he knew they did not care: why should
they?” says he; “every one in this world has as much
as they can do in caring for themselves, and few have leisure
really to think of their neighbours’ distresses,
however they may delight their tongues with talking of
them.”

The natural depravity of mankind and remains of original sin
were so fixed in Mr. Johnson’s opinion, that he was indeed
a most acute observer of their effects; and used to say
sometimes, half in jest, half in earnest, that they were the
remains of his old tutor Mandeville’s instructions.
As a book, however, he took care always loudly to condemn the
“Fable of the Bees,” but not without adding,
“that it was the work of a thinking man.”

I have in former days heard Dr. Collier of the Commons loudly
condemned for uttering sentiments, which twenty years after I
have heard as loudly applauded from the lips of Dr. Johnson,
concerning the well-known writer of that celebrated work: but if
people will live long enough in this capricious world, such
instances of partiality will shock them less and less by frequent
repetition. Mr. Johnson knew mankind, and wished to mend
them: he therefore, to the piety and pure religion, the untainted
integrity, and scrupulous morals of my earliest and most
disinterested friend, judiciously contrived to join a cautious
attention to the capacity of his hearers, and a prudent
resolution not to lessen the influence of his learning and
virtue, by casual freaks of humour and irregular starts of
ill-managed merriment. He did not wish to confound, but to
inform his auditors; and though he did not appear to solicit
benevolence, he always wished to retain authority, and leave his
company impressed with the idea that it was his to teach in this
world, and theirs to learn. What wonder, then, that all
should receive with docility from Johnson those doctrines, which,
propagated by Collier, they drove away from them with
shouts! Dr. Johnson was not grave, however, because he knew
not how to be merry. No man loved laughing better, and his
vein of humour was rich and apparently inexhaustible; though Dr.
Goldsmith said once to him, “We should change companions
oftener, we exhaust one another, and shall soon be both of us
worn out.” Poor Goldsmith was to him, indeed, like
the earthen pot to the iron one in Fontaine’s fables; it
had been better for him, perhaps, that they had changed
companions oftener; yet no experience of his antagonist’s
strength hindered him from continuing the contest. He used
to remind me always of that verse in Berni—

Mr. Johnson made him a comical answer one day, when seeming to
repine at the success of Beattie’s “Essay on
Truth”—“Here’s such a stir,” said
he, “about a fellow that has written one book, and I have
written many.” “Ah, Doctor,” says his
friend, “there go two-and-forty sixpences, you know, to one
guinea.”

They had spent an evening with Eaton Graham, too, I remember
hearing it was at some tavern; his heart was open, and he began
inviting away; told what he could do to make his college
agreeable, and begged the visit might not be delayed.
Goldsmith thanked him, and proposed setting out with Mr. Johnson
for Buckinghamshire in a fortnight. “Nay, hold, Dr.
Minor,” says the other, “I did not invite
you.”

Many such mortifications arose in the course of their
intimacy, to be sure, but few more laughable than when the
newspapers had tacked them together as the pedant and his
flatterer in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Dr.
Goldsmith came to his friend, fretting and foaming, and vowing
vengeance against the printer, etc., till Mr. Johnson, tired of
the bustle, and desirous to think of something else, cried out at
last, “Why, what would’st thou have, dear Doctor! who
the plague is hurt with all this nonsense? and how is a man the
worse, I wonder, in his health, purse, or character, for being
called Holofernes?” “I do not know,”
replies the other, “how you may relish being called
Holofernes, but I do not like at least to play Goodman
Dull.”

Dr. Johnson was indeed famous for disregarding public
abuse. When the people criticised and answered his
pamphlets, papers, etc., “Why, now, these fellows are only
advertising my book,” he would say; “it is surely
better a man should be abused than forgotten.” When
Churchill nettled him, however, it is certain he felt the sting,
or that poet’s works would hardly have been left out of the
edition. Of that, however, I have no right to decide; the
booksellers, perhaps, did not put Churchill on their list.
I know Mr. Johnson was exceedingly zealous to declare how very
little he had to do with the selection. Churchill’s
works, too, might possibly be rejected by him upon a higher
principle; the highest, indeed, if he was inspired by the same
laudable motive which made him reject every authority for a word
in his dictionary that could only be gleaned from writers
dangerous to religion or morality. “I would
not,” said he, “send people to look for words in a
book, that by such a casual seizure of the mind might chance to
mislead it for ever.” In consequence of this
delicacy, Mrs. Montague once observed, “That were an angel
to give the imprimatur, Dr. Johnson’s works were among
those very few which would not be lessened by a
line.” That such praise from such a lady should
delight him, is not strange; insensibility in a case like that
must have been the result alone of arrogance acting on
stupidity. Mr. Johnson had indeed no dislike to the
commendations which he knew he deserved. “What
signifies protesting so against flattery!” would he cry;
“when a person speaks well of one, it must be either true
or false, you know; if true, let us rejoice in his good opinion;
if he lies, it is a proof at least that he loves more to please
me than to sit silent when he need say nothing.”

That natural roughness of his manner so often mentioned would,
notwithstanding the regularity of his notions, burst through them
all from time to time; and he once bade a very celebrated lady,
who praised him with too much zeal, perhaps, or perhaps too
strong an emphasis (which always offended him), “Consider
what her flattery was worth before she choked him with
it.” A few more winters passed in the talking world
showed him the value of that friend’s commendations,
however; and he was very sorry for the disgusting speech he made
her.

I used to think Mr. Johnson’s determined preference of a
cold, monotonous talker over an emphatical and violent one would
make him quite a favourite among the men of ton, whose
insensibility, or affectation of perpetual calmness, certainly
did not give to him the offence it does to many. He loved
“conversation without effort,” he said; and the
encomiums I have heard him so often pronounce on the manners of
Topham Beaucler in society constantly ended in that peculiar
praise, that “it was without effort.”

We were talking of Richardson, who wrote
“Clarissa.” “You think I love
flattery,” says Dr. Johnson, “and so I do; but a
little too much always disgusts me. That fellow Richardson,
on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the
stream of reputation without longing to taste the froth from
every stroke of the oar.”

With regard to slight insults from newspaper abuse, I have
already declared his notions. “They sting one,”
says he, “but as a fly stings a horse; and the eagle will
not catch flies.” He once told me, however, that
Cummyns, the famous Quaker, whose friendship he valued very
highly, fell a sacrifice to their insults, having declared on his
death-bed to Dr. Johnson that the pain of an anonymous letter,
written in some of the common prints of the day, fastened on his
heart, and threw him into the slow fever of which he died.

Nor was Cummyns the only valuable member so lost to
society. Hawkesworth, the pious, the virtuous, and the
wise, for want of that fortitude which casts a shield before the
merits of his friend, fell a lamented sacrifice to wanton malice
and cruelty, I know not how provoked; but all in turn feel the
lash of censure in a country where, as every baby is allowed to
carry a whip, no person can escape except by chance. The
unpublished crimes, unknown distresses, and even death itself,
however, daily occurring in less liberal governments and less
free nations, soon teach one to content oneself with such petty
grievances, and make one acknowledge that the undistinguishing
severity of newspaper abuse may in some measure diminish the
diffusion of vice and folly in Great Britain, and while they
fright delicate minds into forced refinements and affected
insipidity, they are useful to the great causes of virtue in the
soul and liberty in the State; and though sensibility often sinks
under the roughness of their prescriptions, it would be no good
policy to take away their licence.

Knowing the state of Mr. Johnson’s nerves, and how
easily they were affected, I forbore reading in a new magazine,
one day, the death of a Samuel Johnson who expired that month;
but my companion snatching up the book, saw it himself, and
contrary to my expectation, “Oh!” said he, “I
hope Death will now be glutted with Sam Johnsons, and let me
alone for some time to come; I read of another namesake’s
departure last week.” Though Mr. Johnson was commonly
affected even to agony at the thoughts of a friend’s dying,
he troubled himself very little with the complaints they might
make to him about ill-health. “Dear Doctor,”
said he one day to a common acquaintance, who lamented the tender
state of his inside, “do not be like the spider,
man, and spin conversation thus incessantly out of thy own
bowels.” I told him of another friend who suffered
grievously with the gout. “He will live a vast many
years for all that,” replied he, “and then what
signifies how much he suffers! But he will die at last,
poor fellow; there’s the misery; gout seldom takes the fort
by a coup-de-main, but turning the siege into a blockade, obliges
it to surrender at discretion.”

A lady he thought well of was disordered in her health.
“What help has she called in?” inquired
Johnson. “Dr. James, sir,” was the reply.
“What is her disease?” “Oh, nothing
positive; rather a gradual and gentle decline.”
“She will die, then, pretty dear!” answered he.
“When Death’s pale horse runs away with a person on
full speed, an active physician may possibly give them a turn;
but if he carries them on an even, slow pace, down-hill, too! no
care nor skill can save them!”

When Garrick was on his last sick-bed, no arguments, or
recitals of such facts as I had heard, would persuade Mr. Johnson
of his danger. He had prepossessed himself with a notion,
that to say a man was sick was very near wishing him so; and few
things offended him more than prognosticating even the death of
an ordinary acquaintance. “Ay, ay,” said he,
“Swift knew the world pretty well when he said
that—

‘Some dire misfortune to portend,
No enemy can match a friend.’”

The danger, then, of Mr. Garrick, or of Mr. Thrale, whom he
loved better, was an image which no one durst present before his
view; he always persisted in the possibility and hope of their
recovering disorders from which no human creatures by human means
alone ever did recover. His distress for their loss was for
that very reason poignant to excess. But his fears of his
own salvation were excessive. His truly tolerant spirit and
Christian charity, which hopeth all things, and
believeth all things, made him rely securely on the safety
of his friends; while his earnest aspiration after a blessed
immortality made him cautious of his own steps, and timorous
concerning their consequences. He knew how much had been
given, and filled his mind with fancies of how much would be
required, till his impressed imagination was often disturbed by
them, and his health suffered from the sensibility of his too
tender conscience. A real Christian is so apt to
find his talk above his power of performance!

Mr. Johnson did not, however, give in to ridiculous
refinements either of speculation or practice, or suffer himself
to be deluded by specious appearances. “I have had
dust thrown in my eyes too often,” would he say, “to
be blinded so. Let us never confound matters of belief with
matters of opinion.” Some one urged in his presence
the preference of hope to possession; and as I remember produced
an Italian sonnet on the subject. “Let us not,”
cries Johnson, “amuse ourselves with subtleties and
sonnets, when speaking about hope, which is the follower of faith
and the precursor of eternity; but if you only mean those
air-built hopes which to-day excite and to-morrow will destroy,
let us talk away, and remember that we only talk of the pleasures
of hope; we feel those of possession, and no man in his senses
would change the last for the first. Such hope is a mere
bubble, that by a gentle breath may be blown to what size you
will almost, but a rough blast bursts it at once. Hope is
an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very
tranquil minds.” The truth is, Mr. Johnson hated what
he called unprofitable chat; and to a gentleman who had disserted
some time about the natural history of the mouse—“I
wonder what such a one would have said,” cried Johnson,
“if he had ever had the luck to see a
lion!”

I well remember that at Brighthelmstone once, when he was not
present, Mr. Beauclerc asserted that he was afraid of spirits;
and I, who was secretly offended at the charge, asked him, the
first opportunity I could find, “what ground he had ever
given to the world for such a report?” “I
can,” replied he, “recollect nothing nearer it than
my telling Dr. Lawrence, many years ago, that a long time after
my poor mother’s death I heard her voice call
‘Sam!’” “What answer did the
Doctor make to your story, sir?” said I. “None
in the world,” replied he, and suddenly changed the
conversation. Now, as Mr. Johnson had a most unshaken
faith, without any mixture of credulity, this story must either
have been strictly true, or his persuasion of its truth the
effect of disordered spirits. I relate the anecdote
precisely as he told it me, but could not prevail on him to draw
out the talk into length for further satisfaction of my
curiosity.

As Johnson was the firmest of believers, without being
credulous, so he was the most charitable of mortals, without
being what we call an active friend. Admirable at giving
counsel, no man saw his way so clearly; but he would not stir a
finger for the assistance of those to whom he was willing enough
to give advice: besides that, he had principles of laziness, and
could be indolent by rule. To hinder your death, or procure
you a dinner, I mean if really in want of one; his earnestness,
his exertions could not be prevented, though health and purse and
ease were all destroyed by their violence. If you wanted a
slight favour, you must apply to people of other dispositions;
for not a step would Johnson move to obtain a man a vote in a
society, to repay a compliment which might be useful or pleasing,
to write a letter of request, or to obtain a hundred pounds a
year more for a friend, who perhaps had already two or
three. No force could urge him to diligence, no importunity
could conquer his resolution of standing still. “What
good are we doing with all this ado?” would he say;
“dearest lady, let’s hear no more of it!”
I have, however, more than once in my life forced him on such
services, but with extreme difficulty.

We parted at his door one evening when I had teased him for
many weeks to write a recommendatory letter of a little boy to
his schoolmaster; and after he had faithfully promised to do this
prodigious feat before we met again—“Do not forget
dear Dick, sir,” said I, as he went out of the coach.
He turned back, stood still two minutes on the
carriage-step—“When I have written my letter for
Dick, I may hang myself, mayn’t I?” and turned away
in a very ill humour indeed.

Though apt enough to take sudden likings or aversions to
people he occasionally met, he would never hastily pronounce upon
their character; and when, seeing him justly delighted with
Solander’s conversation, I observed once that he was a man
of great parts who talked from a full mind—“It may be
so,” said Mr. Johnson, “but you cannot know it yet,
nor I neither: the pump works well, to be sure! but how, I
wonder, are we to decide in so very short an acquaintance,
whether it is supplied by a spring or a reservoir?”
He always made a great difference in his esteem between talents
and erudition; and when he saw a person eminent for literature,
though wholly unconversible, it fretted him.
“Teaching such tonies,” said he to me one day,
“is like setting a lady’s diamonds in lead, which
only obscures the lustre of the stone, and makes the possessor
ashamed on’t.” Useful and what we call everyday
knowledge had the most of his just praise. “Let your
boy learn arithmetic, dear madam,” was his advice to the
mother of a rich young heir: “he will not then be a prey to
every rascal which this town swarms with. Teach him the
value of money, and how to reckon it; ignorance to a wealthy lad
of one-and-twenty is only so much fat to a sick sheep: it just
serves to call the rooks about him.”

“And all that prey in vice or folly
Joy to see their quarry fly;
Here the gamester light and jolly,
There the lender grave and sly.”

These improviso lines, making part of a long copy of verses
which my regard for the youth on whose birthday they were written
obliges me to suppress, lest they should give him pain, show a
mind of surprising activity and warmth; the more so as he was
past seventy years of age when he composed them; but nothing more
certainly offended Mr. Johnson than the idea of a man’s
faculties (mental ones, I mean) decaying by time. “It
is not true, sir,” would he say; “what a man could
once do, he would always do, unless, indeed, by dint of vicious
indolence, and compliance with the nephews and the nieces who
crowd round an old fellow, and help to tuck him in, till he,
contented with the exchange of fame for ease, e’en resolves
to let them set the pillows at his back, and gives no further
proof of his existence than just to suck the jelly that prolongs
it.”

For such a life or such a death Dr. Johnson was indeed never
intended by Providence: his mind was like a warm climate, which
brings everything to perfection suddenly and vigorously, not like
the alembicated productions of artificial fire, which always
betray the difficulty of bringing them forth when their size is
disproportionate to their flavour. “Je ferois un
Roman tout comme un autre, mais la vie n’est point un
Roman,” says a famous French writer; and this was so
certainly the opinion of the author of the “Rambler,”
that all his conversation precepts tended towards the dispersion
of romantic ideas, and were chiefly intended to promote the
cultivation of

“That which before thee lies in daily
life.”

Milton.

And when he talked of authors, his praise went spontaneously
to such passages as are sure in his own phrase to leave something
behind them useful on common occasions, or observant of common
manners. For example, it was not the two last, but
the two first volumes of “Clarissa” that he
prized; “for give me a sick-bed and a dying lady,”
said he, “and I’ll be pathetic myself. But
Richardson had picked the kernel of life,” he said,
“while Fielding was contented with the husk.”
It was not King Lear cursing his daughters, or deprecating the
storm, that I remember his commendations of; but Iago’s
ingenious malice and subtle revenge; or Prince Hal’s gay
compliance with the vices of Falstaff, whom he all along
despised. Those plays had indeed no rivals in
Johnson’s favour: “No man but Shakespeare,” he
said, “could have drawn Sir John.”

His manner of criticising and commending Addison’s prose
was the same in conversation as we read it in the printed
strictures, and many of the expressions used have been heard to
fall from him on common occasions. It was notwithstanding
observable enough (or I fancied so) that he did never like,
though he always thought fit to praise it; and his praises
resembled those of a man who extols the superior elegance of high
painted porcelain, while he himself always chooses to eat off
plate. I told him so one day, and he neither denied
it nor appeared displeased.

Of the pathetic in poetry he never liked to speak, and the
only passage I ever heard him applaud as particularly tender in
any common book was Jane Shore’s exclamation in the last
act—

“Forgive me! but forgive
me!”

It was not, however, from the want of a susceptible heart that
he hated to cite tender expressions, for he was more strongly and
more violently affected by the force of words representing ideas
capable of affecting him at all than any other man in the world,
I believe: and when he would try to repeat the celebrated Prosa
Ecclesiastica pro Mortuis, as it is called, beginning “Dies
irae, Dies illa,” he could never pass the stanza ending
thus, “Tantus labor non sit cassus,” without bursting
into a flood of tears; which sensibility I used to quote against
him when he would inveigh against devotional poetry, and protest
that all religious verses were cold and feeble, and unworthy the
subject, which ought to be treated with higher reverence, he
said, than either poets or painters could presume to excite or
bestow. Nor can anything be a stronger proof of Dr.
Johnson’s piety than such an expression; for his idea of
poetry was magnificent indeed, and very fully was he persuaded of
its superiority over every other talent bestowed by heaven on
man. His chapter upon that particular subject in his
“Rasselas” is really written from the fulness of his
heart, and quite in his best manner, I think. I am not so
sure that this is the proper place to mention his writing that
surprising little volume in a week or ten days’ time, in
order to obtain money for his journey to Lichfield when his
mother lay upon her last sick-bed.

Promptitude of thought, indeed, and quickness of expression,
were among the peculiar felicities of Johnson; his notions rose
up like the dragon’s teeth sowed by Cadmus all ready
clothed, and in bright armour too, fit for immediate
battle. He was therefore (as somebody is said to have
expressed it) a tremendous converser, and few people ventured to
try their skill against an antagonist with whom contention was so
hopeless. One gentleman, however, who dined at a
nobleman’s house in his company, and that of Mr. Thrale, to
whom I was obliged for the anecdote, was willing to enter the
lists in defence of King William’s character, and having
opposed and contradicted Johnson two or three times petulantly
enough, the master of the house began to feel uneasy, and expect
disagreeable consequences; to avoid which he said, loud enough
for the Doctor to hear, “Our friend here has no meaning now
in all this, except just to relate at club to-morrow how he
teased Johnson at dinner to-day—this is all to do himself
honour.” “No, upon my word,”
replied the other, “I see no honour in it, whatever
you may do.” “Well, sir!” returned Mr.
Johnson, sternly, “if you do not see the
honour, I am sure I feel the
disgrace.”

A young fellow, less confident of his own abilities, lamenting
one day that he had lost all his Greek—“I believe it
happened at the same time, sir,” said Johnson, “that
I lost all my large estate in Yorkshire.”

But however roughly he might be suddenly provoked to treat a
harmless exertion of vanity, he did not wish to inflict the pain
he gave, and was sometimes very sorry when he perceived the
people to smart more than they deserved. “How harshly
you treated that man to-day,” said I once, “who
harangued us so about gardening.” “I am
sorry,” said he, “if I vexed the creature, for there
is certainly no harm in a fellow’s rattling a rattle-box,
only don’t let him think that he thunders.” The
Lincolnshire lady who showed him a grotto she had been making,
came off no better, as I remember. “Would it not be a
pretty cool habitation in summer,” said she, “Mr.
Johnson?” “I think it would, madam,”
replied he, “for a toad.”

All desire of distinction, indeed, had a sure enemy in Mr.
Johnson. We met a friend driving six very small ponies, and
stopped to admire them. “Why does nobody,” said
our Doctor, “begin the fashion of driving six spavined
horses, all spavined of the same leg? It would have a
mighty pretty effect, and produce the distinction of doing
something worse than the common way.”

When Mr. Johnson had a mind to compliment any one he did it
with more dignity to himself, and better effect upon the company,
than any man. I can recollect but few instances, indeed,
though perhaps that may be more my fault than his. When Sir
Joshua Reynolds left the room one day, he said, “There goes
a man not to be spoilt by prosperity.” And when Mrs.
Montague showed him some China plates which had once belonged to
Queen Elizabeth, he told her “that they had no reason to be
ashamed of their present possessor, who was so little inferior to
the first.” I likewise remember that he pronounced
one day at my house a most lofty panegyric upon Jones the
Orientalist, who seemed little pleased with the praise, for what
cause I know not. He was not at all offended when,
comparing all our acquaintance to some animal or other, we
pitched upon the elephant for his resemblance, adding that the
proboscis of that creature was like his mind most exactly, strong
to buffet even the tiger, and pliable to pick up even the
pin. The truth is, Mr. Johnson was often good humouredly
willing to join in childish amusements, and hated to be left out
of any innocent merriment that was going forward. Mr.
Murphy always said he was incomparable at buffoonery; and I
verily think, if he had had good eyes, and a form less
inflexible, he would have made an admirable mimic.

He certainly rode on Mr. Thrale’s old hunter with a good
firmness, and though he would follow the hounds fifty miles on
end sometimes, would never own himself either tired or
amused. “I have now learned,” said he,
“by hunting, to perceive that it is no diversion at all,
nor ever takes a man out of himself for a moment: the dogs have
less sagacity than I could have prevailed on myself to suppose;
and the gentlemen often call to me not to ride over them.
It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of
human pleasure should persuade us ever to call hunting one of
them.” He was, however, proud to be amongst the
sportsmen; and I think no praise ever went so close to his heart
as when Mr. Hamilton called out one day upon Brighthelmstone
Downs, “Why, Johnson rides as well, for aught I see, as the
most illiterate fellow in England.”

Though Dr. Johnson owed his very life to air and exercise,
given him when his organs of respiration could scarcely play, in
the year 1766, yet he ever persisted in the notion that neither
of them had anything to do with health. “People live
as long,” said he, “in Pepper Alley as on Salisbury
Plain; and they live so much happier, that an inhabitant of the
first would, if he turned cottager, starve his understanding for
want of conversation, and perish in a state of mental
inferiority.”

Mr. Johnson, indeed, as he was a very talking man himself, had
an idea that nothing promoted happiness so much as
conversation. A friend’s erudition was commended one
day as equally deep and strong. “He will not talk,
sir,” was the reply, “so his learning does no good,
and his wit, if he has it, gives us no pleasure. Out of all
his boasted stores I never heard him force but one word, and that
word was Richard.” With a contempt not
inferior he received the praises of a pretty lady’s face
and behaviour. “She says nothing, sir,” answers
Johnson; “a talking blackamoor were better than a white
creature who adds nothing to life, and by sitting down before one
thus desperately silent, takes away the confidence one should
have in the company of her chair if she were once out of
it.” No one was, however, less willing to begin any
discourse than himself. His friend, Mr. Thomas Tyers, said
he was like the ghosts, who never speak till they are spoken to:
and he liked the expression so well, that he often repeated
it. He had, indeed, no necessity to lead the stream of chat
to a favourite channel, that his fulness on the subject might be
shown more clearly whatever was the topic; and he usually left
the choice to others. His information best enlightened, his
argument strengthened, and his wit made it ever remembered.
Of him it might have been said, as he often delighted to say of
Edmund Burke, “that you could not stand five minutes with
that man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be
convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had
ever yet seen.”

As we had been saying, one day, that no subject failed of
receiving dignity from the manner in which Mr. Johnson treated
it, a lady at my house said she would make him talk about love,
and took her measures accordingly, deriding the novels of the day
because they treated about love. “It is not,”
replied our philosopher, “because they treat, as you call
it, about love, but because they treat of nothing, that they are
despicable. We must not ridicule a passion which he who
never felt never was happy, and he who laughs at never deserves
to feel—a passion which has caused the change of empires
and the loss of worlds—a passion which has inspired heroism
and subdued avarice.” He thought he had already said
too much. “A passion, in short,” added he, with
an altered tone, “that consumes me away for my pretty Fanny
here, and she is very cruel,” speaking of another lady in
the room. He told us, however, in the course of the same
chat, how his negro Francis had been eminent for his success
among the girls. Seeing us all laugh, “I must have
you know, ladies,” said he, “that Frank has carried
the empire of Cupid further than most men. When I was in
Lincolnshire so many years ago he attended me thither; and when
we returned home together, I found that a female haymaker had
followed him to London for love.” Francis was indeed
no small favourite with his master, who retained, however, a
prodigious influence over his most violent passions.

On the birthday of our eldest daughter, and that of our friend
Dr. Johnson, the 17th and the 18th of September, we every year
made up a little dance and supper, to divert our servants and
their friends, putting the summer-house into their hands for the
two evenings, to fill with acquaintance and merriment.
Francis and his white wife were invited, of course. She was
eminently pretty, and he was jealous, as my maids told me.
On the first of these days’ amusements (I know not what
year) Frank took offence at some attentions paid his Desdemona,
and walked away next morning to London in wrath. His master
and I driving the same road an hour after, overtook him.
“What is the matter, child,” says Dr. Johnson,
“that you leave Streatham to-day. Art
sick?” “He is jealous,” whispered
I. “Are you jealous of your wife, you stupid
blockhead?” cries out his master in another tone. The
fellow hesitated, and, “To be sure, sir, I
don’t quite approve, sir,” was the
stammering reply. “Why, what do they do to
her, man? Do the footmen kiss her?” “No,
sir, no! Kiss my wife, sir! I hope not,
sir.” “Why, what do they do to her, my
lad?” “Why, nothing, sir, I’m sure,
sir.” “Why, then go back directly and dance,
you dog, do; and let’s hear no more of such empty
lamentations.” I believe, however, that Francis was
scarcely as much the object of Mr. Johnson’s personal
kindness as the representative of Dr. Bathurst, for whose sake he
would have loved anybody or anything.

When he spoke of negroes, he always appeared to think them of
a race naturally inferior, and made few exceptions in favour of
his own; yet whenever disputes arose in his household among the
many odd inhabitants of which it consisted, he always sided with
Francis against the others, whom he suspected (not unjustly, I
believe) of greater malignity. It seems at once vexatious
and comical to reflect that the dissensions those people chose to
live constantly in distressed and mortified him
exceedingly. He really was oftentimes afraid of going home,
because he was so sure to be met at the door with numberless
complaints; and he used to lament pathetically to me, and to Mr.
Sastres, the Italian master, who was much his favourite, that
they made his life miserable from the impossibility he found of
making theirs happy, when every favour he bestowed on one was
wormwood to the rest. If, however, I ventured to blame
their ingratitude, and condemn their conduct, he would instantly
set about softening the one and justifying the other; and
finished commonly by telling me, that I knew not how to make
allowances for situations I never experienced.

“To thee no reason who know’st only
good,
But evil hast not tried.”

Milton.

Dr. Johnson knew how to be merry with mean people, too, as
well as to be sad with them; he loved the lower ranks of humanity
with a real affection: and though his talents and learning kept
him always in the sphere of upper life, yet he never lost sight
of the time when he and they shared pain and pleasure in
common. A borough election once showed me his toleration of
boisterous mirth, and his content in the company of people whom
one would have thought at first sight little calculated for his
society. A rough fellow one day on such an occasion, a
hatter by trade, seeing Mr. Johnson’s beaver in a state of
decay, seized it suddenly with one hand, and clapping him on the
back with the other, “Ah, Master Johnson,” says he,
“this is no time to be thinking about
hats.” “No, no, sir,” replied our
Doctor in a cheerful tone, “hats are of no use now, as you
say, except to throw up in the air and huzza with,”
accompanying his words with a true election halloo.

But it was never against people of coarse life that his
contempt was expressed, while poverty of sentiment in men who
considered themselves to be company for the parlour, as he
called it, was what he could not bear. A very ignorant
young fellow, who had plagued us all for nine or ten months, died
at last consumptive. “I think,” said Mr.
Johnson, when he heard the news, “I am afraid I should have
been more concerned for the death of the dog;
but—” (hesitating a while) “I am not wrong now
in all this, for the dog acted up to his character on every
occasion that we know; but that dunce of a fellow helped forward
the general disgrace of humanity.” “Why, dear
sir,” said I, “how odd you are! you have often said
the lad was not capable of receiving further
instruction.” “He was,” replied the
Doctor, “like a corked bottle, with a drop of dirty water
in it, to be sure; one might pump upon it for ever without the
smallest effect; but when every method to open and clean it had
been tried, you would not have me grieve that the bottle was
broke at last.”

This was the same youth who told us he had been reading
“Lucius Florus;” Florus Delphini was the
phrase. “And my mother,” said he,
“thought it had something to do with Delphos; but of that I
know nothing.” “Who founded Rome, then ?”
inquired Mr. Thrale. The lad replied,
“Romulus.” “And who succeeded
Romulus?” said I. A long pause, and apparently
distressful hesitation, followed the difficult question.
“Why will you ask him in terms that he does not
comprehend?” said Mr. Johnson, enraged. “You
might as well bid him tell you who phlebotomised Romulus.
This fellow’s dulness is elastic,” continued he,
“and all we do is but like kicking at a
woolsack.”

The pains he took, however, to obtain the young man more
patient instructors were many, and oftentimes repeated. He
was put under the care of a clergyman in a distant province; and
Mr. Johnson used both to write and talk to his friends concerning
his education. It was on that occasion that I remember his
saying, “A boy should never be sent to Eton or Westminster
School before he is twelve years old at least; for if in his
years of babyhood he escapes that general and transcendent
knowledge without which life is perpetually put to a stand, he
will never get it at a public school, where, if he does not learn
Latin and Greek, he learns nothing.” Mr. Johnson
often said, “that there was too much stress laid upon
literature as indispensably necessary: there is surely no need
that everybody should be a scholar, no call that every one should
square the circle. Our manner of teaching,” said he,
“cramps and warps many a mind, which if left more at
liberty would have been respectable in some way, though perhaps
not in that. We lop our trees, and prune them, and pinch
them about,” he would say, “and nail them tight up to
the wall, while a good standard is at last the only thing for
bearing healthy fruit, though it commonly begins later. Let
the people learn necessary knowledge; let them learn to count
their fingers, and to count their money, before they are caring
for the classics; for,” says Mr. Johnson, “though I
do not quite agree with the proverb, that Nullum numen abest si
sit prudentia, yet we may very well say, that Nullum numen
adest--ni sit prudentia.”

We had been visiting at a lady’s house, whom as we
returned some of the company ridiculed for her ignorance.
“She is not ignorant,” said he, “I believe, of
anything she has been taught, or of anything she is desirous to
know: and I suppose if one wanted a little run tea, she
might be a proper person enough to apply to.”

When I relate these various instances of contemptuous
behaviour shown to a variety of people, I am aware that those who
till now have heard little of Mr. Johnson will here cry out
against his pride and his severity; yet I have been as careful as
I could to tell them that all he did was gentle, if all he said
was rough. Had I given anecdotes of his actions instead of
his words, we should, I am sure, have had nothing on record but
acts of virtue differently modified, as different occasions
called that virtue forth: and among all the nine biographical
essays or performances which I have heard will at last be written
about dear Dr. Johnson, no mean or wretched, no wicked or even
slightly culpable action will, I trust, be found, to produce and
put in the scale against a life of seventy years, spent in the
uniform practice of every moral excellence and every Christian
perfection, save humility alone, says a critic, but that I think
must be excepted. He was not, however, wanting even
in that to a degree seldom attained by man, when the duties of
piety or charity called it forth.

Lowly towards God, and docile towards the Church; implicit in
his belief of the Gospel, and ever respectful towards the people
appointed to preach it; tender of the unhappy, and affectionate
to the poor, let no one hastily condemn as proud a character
which may perhaps somewhat justly be censured as arrogant.
It must, however, be remembered again, that even this arrogance
was never shown without some intention, immediate or remote, of
mending some fault or conveying some instruction. Had I
meant to make a panegyric on Mr. Johnson’s well-known
excellences, I should have told his deeds only, not his
words—sincerely protesting, that as I never saw him once do
a wrong thing, so we had accustomed ourselves to look upon him
almost as an excepted being: and I should as much have expected
injustice from Socrates, or impiety from Paschal, as the
slightest deviation from truth and goodness in any transaction
one might be engaged in with Samuel Johnson. His attention
to veracity was without equal or example: and when I mentioned
Clarissa as a perfect character; “On the contrary,”
said he, “you may observe there is always something which
she prefers to truth. Fielding’s Amelia was the most
pleasing heroine of all the romances,” he said, “but
that vile broken nose, never cured, ruined the sale of perhaps
the only book, which being printed off betimes one morning, a new
edition was called for before night.”

Mr. Johnson’s knowledge of literary history was
extensive and surprising. He knew every adventure of every
book you could name almost, and was exceedingly pleased with the
opportunity which writing the “Poets’ Lives”
gave him to display it. He loved to be set at work, and was
sorry when he came to the end of the business he was about.
I do not feel so myself with regard to these sheets: a fever
which has preyed on me while I wrote them over for the press,
will perhaps lessen my power of doing well the first, and
probably the last work I should ever have thought of presenting
to the public. I could doubtless wish so to conclude it, as
at least to show my zeal for my friend, whose life, as I once had
the honour and happiness of being useful to, I should wish to
record a few particular traits of, that those who read should
emulate his goodness; but feeling the necessity of making even
virtue and learning such as his agreeable, that all should
be warned against such coarseness of manners, as drove even from
him those who loved, honoured, and esteemed him. His
wife’s daughter, Mrs. Lucy Porter, of Lichfield, whose
veneration for his person and character has ever been the
greatest possible, being opposed one day in conversation by a
clergyman who came often to her house, and feeling somewhat
offended, cried out sudden, “Why, Mr. Pearson,” said
she, “you are just like Dr. Johnson, I think: I do not mean
that you are a man of the greatest capacity in all the world like
Dr. Johnson, but that you contradict one every word one speaks,
just like him.”

Mr. Johnson told me the story: he was present at the giving of
the reproof. It was, however, observable, that with all his
odd severity, he could not keep even indifferent people from
teasing him with unaccountable confessions of silly conduct,
which one would think they would scarcely have had inclination to
reveal even to their tenderest and most intimate companions; and
it was from these unaccountable volunteers in sincerity that he
learned to warn the world against follies little known, and
seldom thought on by other moralists.

Much of his eloquence, and much of his logic, have I heard him
use to prevent men from making vows on trivial occasions; and
when he saw a person oddly perplexed about a slight difficulty,
“Let the man alone,” he would say, “and torment
him no more about it; there is a vow in the case, I am convinced;
but is it not very strange that people should be neither afraid
nor ashamed of bringing in God Almighty thus at every turn
between themselves and their dinner?” When I asked
what ground he had for such imaginations, he informed me,
“That a young lady once told him in confidence that she
could never persuade herself to be dressed against the bell rung
for dinner, till she had made a vow to heaven that she would
never more be absent from the family meals.”

The strangest applications in the world were certainly made
from time to time towards Mr. Johnson, who by that means had an
inexhaustible fund of ancecdote, and could, if he pleased, tell
the most astonishing stories of human folly and human weakness
that ever were confided to any man not a confessor by
profession.

One day, when he was in a humour to record some of them, he
told us the following tale:—“A person,” said
he, “had for these last five weeks often called at my door,
but would not leave his name or other message, but that he wished
to speak with me. At last we met, and he told me that he
was oppressed by scruples of conscience. I blamed him
gently for not applying, as the rules of our Church direct, to
his parish priest or other discreet clergyman; when, after some
compliments on his part, he told me that he was clerk to a very
eminent trader, at whose warehouses much business consisted in
packing goods in order to go abroad; that he was often tempted to
take paper and packthread enough for his own use, and that he had
indeed done so so often, that he could recollect no time when he
ever had bought any for himself. ‘But
probably,’ said I, ‘your master was wholly
indifferent with regard to such trivial emoluments. You had
better ask for it at once, and so take your trifles with
content.’ ‘Oh, sir!’ replies the visitor,
‘my master bid me have as much as I pleased, and was half
angry when I talked to him about it.’ ‘Then
pray, sir,’ said I, ‘tease me no more about such airy
nothings,’ and was going on to be very angry, when I
recollected that the fellow might be mad, perhaps; so I asked
him, ‘When he left the counting-house of an
evening?’ ‘At seven o’clock,
sir.’ ‘And when do you go to bed,
sir?’ ‘At twelve o’clock.’
‘Then,’ replied I, ‘I have at least learnt thus
much by my new acquaintance—that five hours of the
four-and-twenty unemployed are enough for a man to go mad in; so
I would advise you, sir, to study algebra, if you are not an
adept already in it. Your head would get less muddy,
and you will leave off tormenting your neighbours about paper and
packthread, while we all live together in a world that is
bursting with sin and sorrow.’ It is perhaps needless
to add that this visitor came no more.”

Mr. Johnson had, indeed, a real abhorrence of a person that
had ever before him treated a little thing like a great one; and
he quoted this scrupulous gentleman with his packthread very
often, in ridicule of a friend who, looking out on Streatham
Common from our windows, one day, lamented the enormous
wickedness of the times because some bird-catchers were busy
there one fine Sunday morning. “While half the
Christian world is permitted,” said he, “to dance and
sing and celebrate Sunday as a day of festivity, how comes your
Puritanical spirit so offended with frivolous and empty
deviations from exactness? Whoever loads life with
unnecessary scruples, sir,” continued he, “provokes
the attention of others on his conduct, and incurs the censure of
singularity without reaping the reward of superior
virtue.”

I must not, among the anecdotes of Dr. Johnson’s life,
omit to relate a thing that happened to him one day, which he
told me of himself. As he was walking along the Strand a
gentleman stepped out of some neighbouring tavern, with his
napkin in his hand, and no hat, and stopping him as civily as he
could, “I beg your pardon, sir, but you are Dr. Johnson, I
believe?” “Yes, sir.” “We
have a wager depending on your reply. Pray, sir, is it
irreparable or irrepairable that one should
say?” “The last, I think, sir,”
answered Dr. Johnson, “for the adverb ought to follow the
verb; but you had better consult my ‘Dictionary’ than
me, for that was the result of more thought than you will now
give me time for.” “No, no,” replied the
gentleman, gaily, “the book I have no certainty at all of,
but here is the author, to whom I referred. Is he
not, sir?”—to a friend with him. “I have
won my twenty guineas quite fairly, and am much obliged to you,
sir;” and so shaking Mr. Johnson kindly by the hand, he
went back to finish his dinner or dessert.

Another strange thing he told me once which there was no
danger of forgetting; how a young gentleman called on him one
morning, and told him that his father having, just before his
death, dropped suddenly into the enjoyment of an ample fortune,
he (the son) was willing to qualify himself for genteel society
by adding some literature to his other endowments, and wished to
be put in an easy way of obtaining it. Dr. Johnson
recommended the university, “for you read Latin, sir, with
facility?” “I read it a little, to be
sure, sir.” “But do you read it with
facility, I say?” “Upon my word, sir, I do
not very well know, but I rather believe not.” Mr.
Johnson now began to recommend other branches of science, when he
found languages at such an immeasurable distance, and advising
him to study natural history, there arose some talk about
animals, and their divisions into oviparous and viviparous.
“And the cat here, sir,” said the youth, who wished
for instruction; “pray in what class is she?”
Our Doctor’s patience and desire of doing good began now to
give way to the natural roughness of his temper. “You
would do well,” said he, “to look for some person to
be always about you, sir, who is capable of explaining such
matters, and not come to us”—there were some literary
friends present, as I recollect—“to know whether the
cat lays eggs or not. Get a discreet man to keep you
company: there are so many who would be glad of your table and
fifty pounds a year.” The young gentleman retired,
and in less than a week informed his friends that he had fixed on
a preceptor to whom no objections could be made; but when he
named as such one of the most distinguished characters in our age
or nation, Mr. Johnson fairly gave himself up to an honest burst
of laughter; and seeing this youth at such a surprising distance
from common knowledge of the world, or of anything in it, desired
to see his visitor no more.

He had not much better luck with two boys that he used to tell
of, to whom he had taught the classics, “so that,” he
said, “they were no incompetent or mean
scholars.” It was necessary, however, that something
more familiar should be known, and he bid them read the History
of England. After a few months had elapsed he asked them,
“If they could recollect who first destroyed the
monasteries in our island?” One modestly replied that
he did not know; the other said Jesus Christ!

Of the truth of stories which ran currently about the town
concerning Dr. Johnson it was impossible to be certain, unless
one asked him himself, and what he told, or suffered to be told,
before his face without contradicting, has every public mark, I
think, of real and genuine authenticity. I made, one day,
very minute inquiries about the tale of his knocking down the
famous Tom Osborne with his own “Dictionary” in the
man’s own house. “And how was that
affair? In earnest? Do tell me, Mr.
Johnson?” “There is nothing to tell, dearest
lady, but that he was insolent, and I beat him, and that he was a
blockhead, and told of it, which I should never have done.
So the blows have been multiplying and the wonder thickening for
all these years, as Thomas was never a favourite with the
public. I have beat many a fellow, but the rest had the wit
to hold their tongues.”

I have heard Mr. Murphy relate a very singular story, while he
was present, greatly to the credit of his uncommon skill and
knowledge of life and manners. When first the
“Ramblers” came out in separate numbers, as they were
the objects of attention to multitudes of people, they happened,
as it seems, particularly to attract the notice of a society who
met every Saturday evening during the summer at Romford in Essex,
and were known by the name of the Bowling-Green Club. These
men seeing one day the character of Leviculus, the
fortune-hunter, or Tetrica, the old maid: another day some
account of a person who spent his life in hoping for a legacy, or
of him who is always prying into other folks’ affairs,
began sure enough to think they were betrayed, and that some of
the coterie sate down to divert himself by giving to the public
the portrait of all the rest. Filled with wrath against the
traitor of Romford, one of them resolved to write to the printer,
and inquire the author’s name. Samuel Johnson, was
the reply. No more was necessary; Samuel Johnson was the
name of the curate, and soon did each begin to load him with
reproaches for turning his friends into ridicule in a manner so
cruel and unprovoked. In vain did the guiltless curate
protest his innocence; one was sure that Aligu meant Mr. Twigg,
and that Cupidus was but another name for neighbour Baggs, till
the poor parson, unable to contend any longer, rode to London,
and brought them full satisfaction concerning the writer, who,
from his own knowledge of general manners, quickened by a
vigorous and warm imagination, had happily delineated, though
unknown to himself, the members of the Bowling-Green Club.

Mr. Murphy likewise used to tell before Dr. Johnson, of the
first time they met, and the occasion of their meeting,
which he related thus. That being in those days engaged in
a periodical paper, he found himself at a friend’s house
out of town; and not being disposed to lose pleasure for the sake
of business, wished rather to content his bookseller by sending
some unstudied essay to London by the servant, than deny himself
the company of his acquaintance, and drive away to his chambers
for the purpose of writing something more correct. He
therefore took up a French Journal Litteraire that lay about the
room, and translating something he liked from it, sent it away
without further examination. Time, however, discovered that
he had translated from the French a “Rambler” of
Johnson’s, which had been but a month before taken from the
English; and thinking it right to make him his personal excuses,
he went next day, and found our friend all covered with soot like
a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, with an intolerable heat and
strange smell, as if he had been acting Lungs in the
‘Alchymist,’ making aether. “Come,
come,” says Dr. Johnson, “dear Mur, the story is
black enough now; and it was a very happy day for me that brought
you first to my house, and a very happy mistake about the
‘Ramblers.’”

Dr. Johnson was always exceeding fond of chemistry; and we
made up a sort of laboratory at Streatham one summer, and
diverted ourselves with drawing essences and colouring
liquors. But the danger Mr. Thrale found his friend in one
day when I was driven to London, and he had got the children and
servants round him to see some experiments performed, put an end
to all our entertainment, so well was the master of the house
persuaded that his short sight would have been his destruction in
a moment, by bringing him close to a fierce and violent
flame. Indeed, it was a perpetual miracle that he did not
set himself on fire reading a-bed, as was his constant custom,
when exceedingly unable even to keep clear of mischief with our
best help; and accordingly the fore-top of all his wigs were
burned by the candle down to the very net work. Mr.
Thrale’s valet de chambre, for that reason, kept one always
in his own hands, with which he met him at the parlour-door when
the bell had called him down to dinner, and as he went upstairs
to sleep in the afternoon, the same man constantly followed him
with another.

Future experiments in chemistry, however, were too dangerous,
and Mr. Thrale insisted that we should do no more towards finding
the Philosopher’s Stone.

Mr. Johnson’s amusements were thus reduced to the
pleasures of conversation merely. And what wonder that he
should have an avidity for the sole delight he was able to
enjoy? No man conversed so well as he on every subject; no
man so acutely discerned the reason of every fact, the motive of
every action, the end of every design. He was indeed often
pained by the ignorance or causeless wonder of those who knew
less than himself, though he seldom drove them away with apparent
scorn, unless he thought they added presumption to
stupidity. And it was impossible not to laugh at the
patience he showed, when a Welsh parson of mean abilities, though
a good heart, struck with reverence at the sight of Dr. Johnson,
whom he had heard of as the greatest man living, could not find
any words to answer his inquiries concerning a motto round
somebody’s arms which adorned a tombstone in Ruabon
churchyard. If I remember right the words were—

“Heb Dw, Heb Dym,
Dw o’ diggon.”

And though of no very difficult construction, the gentleman
seemed wholly confounded, and unable to explain them; till Mr.
Johnson, having picked out the meaning by little and little, said
to the man, “Heb is a preposition, I believe, sir, is it
not?” My countryman recovering some spirits upon the
sudden question, cried out, “So I humbly presume,
sir,” very comically.

Stories of humour do not tell well in books; and what made
impression on the friends who heard a jest will seldom much
delight the distant acquaintance or sullen critic who reads
it. The cork model of Paris is not more despicable as a
resemblance of a great city, than this book, levior cortice, as a
specimen of Johnson’s character. Yet everybody
naturally likes to gather little specimens of the rarities found
in a great country; and could I carry home from Italy square
pieces of all the curious marbles which are the just glory of
this surprising part of the world, I could scarcely contrive,
perhaps, to arrange them so meanly as not to gain some attention
from the respect due to the places they once belonged to.
Such a piece of motley Mosaic work will these anecdotes
inevitably make. But let the reader remember that he was
promised nothing better, and so be as contented as he can.

An Irish trader at our house one day heard Dr. Johnson launch
out into very great and greatly deserved praises of Mr. Edmund
Burke. Delighted to find his countryman stood so high in
the opinion of a man he had been told so much of,
“Sir,” said he, “give me leave to tell
something of Mr. Burke now.” We were all silent, and
the honest Hibernian began to relate how Mr. Burke went to see
the collieries in a distant province; and he would go down into
the bowels of the earth (in a bag), and he would examine
everything. “He went in a bag, sir, and ventured his
health and his life for knowledge: but he took care of his
clothes, that they should not be spoiled, for he went down in a
bag.” “Well, sir,” says Mr. Johnson,
good-humouredly, “if our friend Mund should die in any of
these hazardous exploits, you and I would write his life and
panegyric together; and your chapter of it should be entitled
thus: ‘Burke in a Bag.’”

He had always a very great personal regard and particular
affection for Mr. Edmund Burke, as well as an esteem difficult
for me to repeat, though for him only easy to express. And
when at the end of the year 1774 the General Election called us
all different ways, and broke up the delightful society in which
we had spent some time at Beaconsfield, Dr. Johnson shook the
hospitable master of the house kindly by the hand, and said,
“Farewell, my dear sir, and remember that I wish you all
the success which ought to be wished you, which can possibly be
wished you, indeed—by an honest man.”

I must here take leave to observe, that in giving little
memoirs of Mr. Johnson’s behaviour and conversation, such
as I saw and heard it, my book lies under manifest disadvantages,
compared with theirs, who having seen him in various situations,
and observed his conduct in numberless cases, are able to throw
stronger and more brilliant lights upon his character.
Virtues are like shrubs, which yield their sweets in different
manners according to the circumstances which surround them; and
while generosity of soul scatters its fragrance like the
honeysuckle, and delights the senses of many occasional
passengers, who feel the pleasure, and half wonder how the breeze
has blown it from so far, the more sullen but not less valuable
myrtle waits like fortitude to discover its excellence, till the
hand arrives that will crush it, and force out that
perfume whose durability well compensates the difficulty of
production.

I saw Mr. Johnson in none but a tranquil, uniform state,
passing the evening of his life among friends, who loved,
honoured, and admired him. I saw none of the things he did,
except such acts of charity as have been often mentioned in this
book, and such writings as are universally known. What he
said is all I can relate; and from what he said, those who think
it worth while to read these anecdotes must be contented to
gather his character. Mine is a mere candle-light
picture of his latter days, where everything falls in dark shadow
except the face, the index of the mind; but even that is seen
unfavourably, and with a paleness beyond what nature gave it.

When I have told how many follies Dr. Johnson knew of others,
I must not omit to mention with how much fidelity he would always
have kept them concealed, could they of whom he knew the
absurdities have been contented, in the common phrase, to keep
their own counsel. But returning home one day from dining
at the chaplain’s table, he told me that Dr. Goldsmith had
given a very comical and unnecessarily exact recital there of his
own feelings when his play was hissed: telling the company how he
went, indeed, to the Literary Club at night, and chatted gaily
among his friends, as if nothing had happened amiss; that to
impress them still more forcibly with an idea of his magnanimity,
he even sung his favourite song about an old woman tossed in a
blanket seventeen times as high as the moon; “but all this
while I was suffering horrid tortures,” said he, “and
verily believe that if I had put a bit in my mouth it would have
strangled me on the spot, I was so excessively ill. But I
made more noise than usual to cover all that, and so they never
perceived my not eating, nor I believe at all imaged to
themselves the anguish of my heart; but when all were gone except
Johnson here, I burst out a-crying, and even swore by --- that I
would never write again.” “All which,
Doctor,” says Mr. Johnson, amazed at his odd frankness,
“I thought had been a secret between you and me; and I am
sure I would not have said anything about it for the world.
Now see,” repeated he, when he told the story, “what
a figure a man makes who thus unaccountably chooses to be the
frigid narrator of his own disgrace. Il volto sciolto, ed i
pensieri stretti, was a proverb made on purpose for such mortals,
to keep people, if possible, from being thus the heralds of their
own shame; for what compassion can they gain by such silly
narratives? No man should be expected to sympathise with
the sorrows of vanity. If, then, you are mortified by any
ill-usage, whether real or supposed, keep at least the account of
such mortifications to yourself, and forbear to proclaim how
meanly you are thought on by others, unless you desire to be
meanly thought of by all.”

The little history of another friend’s superfluous
ingenuity will contribute to introduce a similar remark. He
had a daughter of about fourteen years old, as I remember, fat
and clumsy; and though the father adored, and desired others to
adore her, yet being aware, perhaps, that she was not what the
French call paitrie des graces, and thinking, I suppose, that the
old maxim of beginning to laugh at yourself first when you have
anything ridiculous about you was a good one, he comically enough
called his girl Trundle when he spoke of her; and many who
bore neither of them any ill-will felt disposed to laugh at the
happiness of the appellation. “See, now,” says
Dr. Johnson, “what haste people are in to be hooted.
Nobody ever thought of this fellow nor of his daughter, could he
but have been quiet himself, and forborne to call the eyes of the
world on his dowdy and her deformity. But it teaches one to
see at least that if nobody else will nickname one’s
children, the parents will e’en do it
themselves.”

All this held true in matters to Mr. Johnson of more serious
consequence. When Sir Joshua Reynolds had painted his
portrait looking into the slit of his pen, and holding it almost
close to his eye, as was his general custom, he felt displeased,
and told me “he would not be known by posterity for his
defects only, let Sir Joshua do his worst.” I
said in reply that Reynolds had no such difficulties about
himself, and that he might observe the picture which hung up in
the room where we were talking represented Sir Joshua holding his
ear in his hand to catch the sound. “He may paint
himself as deaf if he chooses,” replied Johnson, “but
I will not be Blinking Sam.”

It is chiefly for the sake of evincing the regularity and
steadiness of Mr. Johnson’s mind that I have given these
trifling memoirs, to show that his soul was not different from
that of another person, but, as it was, greater; and to give
those who did not know him a just idea of his acquiescence in
what we call vulgar prejudices, and of his extreme distance from
those notions which the world has agreed, I know not very well
why, to call romantic. It is indeed observable in his
preface to Shakespeare, that while other critics expatiate on the
creative powers and vivid imagination of that matchless poet, Dr.
Johnson commends him for giving so just a representation of human
manners, “that from his scenes a hermit might estimate the
value of society, and a confessor predict the progress of the
passions.” I have not the book with me here, but am
pretty sure that such is his expression.

The general and constant advice he gave, too, when consulted
about the choice of a wife, a profession, or whatever influences
a man’s particular and immediate happiness, was always to
reject no positive good from fears of its contrary
consequences. “Do not,” said he, “forbear
to marry a beautiful woman if you can find such, out of a fancy
that she will be less constant than an ugly one; or condemn
yourself to the society of coarseness and vulgarity for fear of
the expenses or other dangers of elegance and personal charms,
which have been always acknowledged as a positive good, and for
the want of which there should be always given some weighty
compensation. I have, however,” continued Mr.
Johnson, “seen some prudent fellows who forbore to connect
themselves with beauty lest coquetry should be near, and with wit
or birth lest insolence should lurk behind them, till they have
been forced by their discretion to linger life away in tasteless
stupidity, and choose to count the moments by remembrance of pain
instead of enjoyment of pleasure.”

When professions were talked of, “Scorn,” said Mr.
Johnson, “to put your behaviour under the dominion of
canters; never think it clever to call physic a mean study, or
law a dry one; or ask a baby of seven years old which way his
genius leads him, when we all know that a boy of seven
years old has no genius for anything except a pegtop and
an apple-pie; but fix on some business where much money may be
got, and little virtue risked: follow that business steadily, and
do not live as Roger Ascham says the wits do, ‘men know not
how; and at last die obscurely, men mark not
where.’”

Dr. Johnson had indeed a veneration for the voice of mankind
beyond what most people will own; and as he liberally confessed
that all his own disappointments proceeded from himself, he hated
to hear others complain of general injustice. I remember
when lamentation was made of the neglect showed to Jeremiah
Markland, a great philologist, as some one ventured to call
him. “He is a scholar, undoubtedly, sir,”
replied Dr. Johnson, “but remember that he would run from
the world, and that it is not the world’s business to run
after him. I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or
laziness drives into a corner, and does nothing when he is there
but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and
bark. The world,” added he, “is chiefly
unjust and ungenerous in this, that all are ready to encourage a
man who once talks of leaving it, and few things do really
provoke me more than to hear people prate of retirement, when
they have neither skill to discern their own motives, or
penetration to estimate the consequences. But while a
fellow is active to gain either power or wealth,” continued
he, “everybody produces some hindrance to his advancement,
some sage remark, or some unfavourable prediction; but let him
once say slightly, I have had enough of this troublesome,
bustling world, ’tis time to leave it now: ‘Ah, dear
sir!’ cries the first old acquaintance he meets, ‘I
am glad to find you in this happy disposition: yes, dear friend!
do retire and think of nothing but your own ease.
There’s Mr. William will find it a pleasure to settle all
your accounts and relieve you from the fatigue; Miss Dolly makes
the charmingest chicken-broth in the world, and the cheesecakes
we ate of hers once, how good they were. I will be coming
every two or three days myself to chat with you in a quiet way;
so snug! and tell you how matters go upon ’Change,
or in the House, or according to the blockhead’s first
pursuits, whether lucrative or politic, which thus he leaves; and
lays himself down a voluntary prey to his own sensuality and
sloth, while the ambition and avarice of the nephews and nieces,
with their rascally adherents and coadjutors, reap the advantage,
while they fatten their fool.’”

As the votaries of retirement had little of Mr.
Johnson’s applause, unless that he knew that the motives
were merely devotional, and unless he was convinced that their
rituals were accompanied by a mortified state of the body, the
sole proof of their sincerity which he would admit, as a
compensation for such fatigue as a worldly life of care and
activity requires; so of the various states and conditions of
humanity, he despised none more, I think, than the man who
marries for a maintenance. And of a friend who made his
alliance on no higher principles, he said once, “Now has
that fellow (it was a nobleman of whom we were speaking) at
length obtained a certainty of three meals a day, and for that
certainty, like his brother dog in the fable, he will get his
neck galled for life with a collar.”

That poverty was an evil to be avoided by all honest means,
however, no man was more ready to avow: concealed poverty
particularly, which he said was the general corrosive that
destroyed the peace of almost every family; to which no evening
perhaps ever returned without some new project for hiding the
sorrows and dangers of the next day. “Want of
money,” says Dr. Johnson, “is sometimes concealed
under pretended avarice, and sly hints of aversion to part with
it; sometimes under stormy anger, and affectation of boundless
rage, but oftener still under a show of thoughtless extravagance
and gay neglect, while to a penetrating eye none of these
wretched veils suffice to keep the cruel truth from being
seen. Poverty is hic et ubique,” says he, “and
if you do shut the jade out of the door, she will always contrive
in some manner to poke her pale, lean face in at the
window.”

I have mentioned before that old age had very little of Mr.
Johnson’s reverence. “A man commonly grew
wickeder as he grew older,” he said, “at least he but
changed the vices of youth; headstrong passion and wild temerity,
for treacherous caution, and desire to circumvent. I am
always,” said he, “on the young people’s side,
when there is a dispute between them and the old ones, for you
have at least a chance for virtue till age has withered its very
root.” While we were talking, my mother’s
spaniel, whom he never loved, stole our toast and butter;
“Fie, Belle!” said I, “you used to be upon
honour.” “Yes, madam,” replies Johnson,
“but Belle grows old.” His reason for
hating the dog was, “because she was a professed
favourite,” he said, “and because her lady ordered
her from time to time to be washed and combed, a foolish
trick,” said he, “and an assumption of superiority
that every one’s nature revolts at; so because one must not
wish ill to the lady in such cases,” continued he,
“one curses the cur.” The truth is, Belle was
not well behaved, and being a large spaniel, was troublesome
enough at dinner with frequent solicitations to be fed.
“This animal,” said Dr. Johnson one day, “would
have been of extraordinary merit and value in the state of
Lycurgus; for she condemns one to the exertion of perpetual
vigilance.”

He had, indeed, that strong aversion felt by all the lower
ranks of people towards four-footed companions very completely,
notwithstanding he had for many years a cat which he called
Hodge, that kept always in his room at Fleet Street; but so exact
was he not to offend the human species by superfluous attention
to brutes, that when the creature was grown sick and old, and
could eat nothing but oysters, Mr. Johnson always went out
himself to buy Hodge’s dinner, that Francis the
black’s delicacy might not be hurt, at seeing himself
employed for the convenience of a quadruped.

No one was, indeed, so attentive not to offend in all such
sort of things as Dr. Johnson; nor so careful to maintain the
ceremonies of life: and though he told Mr. Thrale once that he
had never sought to please till past thirty years old,
considering the matter as hopeless, he had been always studious
not to make enemies by apparent preference of himself. It
happened very comically that the moment this curious conversation
passed, of which I was a silent auditress, was in the coach, in
some distant province, either Shropshire or Derbyshire, I
believe; and as soon as it was over, Mr. Johnson took out of his
pocket a little book and read, while a gentleman of no small
distinction for his birth and elegance suddenly rode up to the
carriage, and paying us all his proper compliments, was desirous
not to neglect Dr. Johnson; but observing that he did not see
him, tapped him gently on the shoulder. “’Tis
Mr. Ch-lm---ley,” says my husband. “Well, sir!
and what if it is Mr. Ch-lm---ley!” says the other,
sternly, just lifting his eyes a moment from his book, and
returning to it again with renewed avidity.

He had sometimes fits of reading very violent; and when he was
in earnest about getting through some particular pages, for I
have heard him say he never read but one book, which he did not
consider as obligatory, through in his whole life (and
“Lady Mary Wortley’s Letters,” was the book);
he would be quite lost to the company, and withdraw all his
attention to what he was reading, without the smallest knowledge
or care about the noise made round him. His deafness made
such conduct less odd and less difficult to him than it would
have been to another man: but his advising others to take the
same method, and pull a little book out when they were not
entertained with what was going forward in society, seemed more
likely to advance the growth of science than of polished manners,
for which he always pretended extreme veneration.

Mr. Johnson, indeed, always measured other people’s
notions of everything by his own, and nothing could persuade him
to believe that the books which he disliked were agreeable to
thousands, or that air and exercise which he despised were
beneficial to the health of other mortals. When poor Smart,
so well known for his wit and misfortunes, was first obliged to
be put in private lodgings, a common friend of both lamented in
tender terms the necessity which had torn so pleasing a companion
from their acquaintance. “A madman must be confined,
sir,” replies Dr. Johnson. “But,” says
the other, “I am now apprehensive for his general health,
he will lose the benefit of exercise.”
“Exercise!” returns the Doctor, “I never heard
that he used any: he might, for aught I know, walk to the
alehouse; but I believe he was always carried home
again.”

It was, however, unlucky for those who delighted to echo
Johnson’s sentiments, that he would not endure from them
to-day what perhaps he had yesterday, by his own manner of
treating the subject, made them fond of repeating; and I fancy
Mr. B--- has not forgotten that though his friend one evening in
a gay humour talked in praise of wine as one of the blessings
permitted by heaven, when used with moderation, to lighten the
load of life, and give men strength to endure it; yet, when in
consequence of such talk he thought fit to make a Bacchanalian
discourse in its favour, Mr. Johnson contradicted him somewhat
roughly, as I remember; and when, to assure himself of conquest,
he added these words: “You must allow me, sir, at least
that it produces truth; in vino veritas, you know,
sir.” “That,” replied Mr. Johnson,
“would be useless to a man who knew he was not a liar when
he was sober.”

When one talks of giving and taking the lie familiarly, it is
impossible to forbear recollecting the transactions between the
editor of “Ossian,” and the author of the
“Journey to the Hebrides.” It was most
observable to me, however, that Mr. Johnson never bore his
antagonist the slightest degree of ill-will. He always kept
those quarrels which belonged to him as a writer separate from
those which he had to do with as a man; but I never did hear him
say in private one malicious word of a public enemy; and of Mr.
Macpherson I once heard him speak respectfully, though his reply
to the friend who asked him if any man living could have
written such a book, is well known, and has been often
repeated—“Yes, sir, many men, many women, and many
children.”

I inquired of him myself if this story was authentic, and he
said it was. I made the same inquiry concerning his account
of the state of literature in Scotland, which was repeated up and
down at one time by everybody—“How knowledge was
divided among the Scots, like bread in a besieged town, to every
man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful.” This story he
likewise acknowledged, and said, besides, “that some
officious friend had carried it to Lord Bute, who only answered,
‘Well, well! never mind what he says, he will have the
pension all one.’”

Another famous reply to a Scotsman who commended the beauty
and dignity of Glasgow, till Mr. Johnson stopped him by
observing, “that he probably had never yet seen
Brentford,” was one of the jokes he owned; and said himself
“that when a gentleman of that country once mentioned the
lovely prospects common in his nation, he could not help telling
him that the view of the London road was the prospect in which
every Scotsman most naturally and most rationally
delighted.”

Mrs. Brooke received an answer not unlike this, when
expatiating on the accumulation of sublime and beautiful objects,
which form the fine prospect up the River St. Lawrence, in
North America. “Come, madam,” says Dr. Johnson,
“confess that nothing ever equalled your pleasure in seeing
that sight reversed; and finding yourself looking at the happy
prospect down the River St. Lawrence.” The
truth is, he hated to hear about prospects and views, and laying
out ground and taste in gardening. “That was the best
garden,” he said, “which produced most roots and
fruits; and that water was most to be prized which contained most
fish.” He used to laugh at Shenstone most
unmercifully for not caring whether there was anything good to
eat in the streams he was so fond of, “as if,”
says Johnson, “one could fill one’s belly with
hearing soft murmurs, or looking at rough cascades!”

He loved the sight of fine forest trees, however, and detested
Brighthelmstone Downs, “because it was a country so truly
desolate,” he said, “that if one had a mind to hang
one’s self for desperation at being obliged to live there,
it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the
rope.” Walking in a wood when it rained was, I think,
the only rural image he pleased his fancy with;
“for,” says he, “after one has gathered the
apples in an orchard, one wishes them well baked, and removed to
a London eating-house for enjoyment.”

With such notions, who can wonder he passed his time
uncomfortably enough with us, who he often complained of for
living so much in the country, “feeding the
chickens,” as he said I did, “till I starved my own
understanding. Get, however,” said he, “a book
about gardening, and study it hard, since you will pass your life
with birds and flowers, and learn to raise the largest
turnips, and to breed the biggest fowls.” It
was vain to assure him that the goodness of such dishes did not
depend upon their size. He laughed at the people who
covered their canals with foreign fowls, “when,” says
he, “our own geese and ganders are twice as large. If
we fetched better animals from distant nations, there might be
some sense in the preference; but to get cows from Alderney, or
water-fowl from China, only to see nature degenerating round one,
is a poor ambition indeed.”

Nor was Mr. Johnson more merciful with regard to the
amusements people are contented to call such. “You
hunt in the morning,” says he, “and crowd to the
public rooms at night, and call it diversion, when your
heart knows it is perishing with poverty of pleasures, and your
wits get blunted for want of some other mind to sharpen them
upon. There is in this world no real delight (excepting
those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation; and
whoever has once experienced the full flow of London talk, when
he retires to country friendships, and rural sports, must either
be contented to turn baby again and play with the rattle, or he
will pine away like a great fish in a little pond, and die for
want of his usual food.” “Books without the
knowledge of life are useless,” I have heard him say;
“for what should books teach but the art of
living? To study manners, however, only in
coffee-houses, is more than equally imperfect; the minds of men
who acquire no solid learning, and only exist on the daily forage
that they pick up by running about, and snatching what drops from
their neighbours as ignorant as themselves, will never ferment
into any knowledge valuable or durable; but like the light wines
we drink in hot countries, please for the moment, though
incapable of keeping. In the study of mankind much will be
found to swim as froth, and much must sink as feculence, before
the wine can have its effect, and become that noblest liquor
which rejoices the heart, and gives vigour to the
imagination.”

I am well aware that I do not and cannot give each expression
of Dr. Johnson with all its force or all its neatness; but I have
done my best to record such of his maxims, and repeat such of his
sentiments, as may give to those who know him not a just idea of
his character and manner of thinking. To endeavour at
adorning, or adding, or softening, or meliorating such anecdotes,
by any tricks my inexperienced pen could play, would be weakness
indeed; worse than the Frenchman who presides over the porcelain
manufactory at Seve, to whom, when some Greek vases were given
him as models, he lamented la tristesse de telles formes; and
endeavoured to assist them by clusters of flowers, while flying
Cupids served for the handles of urns originally intended to
contain the ashes of the dead. The misery is, that I can
recollect so few anecdotes, and that I have recorded no more
axioms of a man whose every word merited attention, and whose
every sentiment did honour to human nature. Remote from
affectation as from error or falsehood, the comfort a reader has
in looking over these papers is the certainty that these were
really the opinions of Johnson, which are related as such.

Fear of what others may think is the great cause of
affectation; and he was not likely to disguise his notions out of
cowardice. He hated disguise, and nobody penetrated it so
readily. I showed him a letter written to a common friend,
who was at some loss for the explanation of it.
“Whoever wrote it,” says our doctor, “could, if
he chose it, make himself understood; but ’tis the letter
of an embarrassed man sir;” and so the event proved
it to be.

Mysteriousness in trifles offended him on every side.
“It commonly ended in guilt,” he said; “for
those who begin by concealment of innocent things will soon have
something to hide which they dare not bring to
light.” He therefore encouraged an openness of
conduct, in women particularly, “who,” he observed,
“were often led away when children, by their delight and
power of surprising.” He recommended, on something
like the same principle, that when one person meant to serve
another, he should not go about it slily, or as we say,
underhand, out of a false idea of delicacy, to surprise
one’s friend with an unexpected favour, “which, ten
to one,” says he, “fails to oblige your acquaintance,
who had some reasons against such a mode of obligation, which you
might have known but for that superfluous cunning which you think
an elegance. Oh! never be seduced by such silly
pretences,” continued he; “if a wench wants a good
gown, do not give her a fine smelling-bottle, because that is
more delicate: as I once knew a lady lend the key of her library
to a poor scribbling dependant, as if she took the woman for an
ostrich that could digest iron.” He said, indeed,
“that women were very difficult to be taught the proper
manner of conferring pecuniary favours; that they always gave too
much money or too little; for that they had an idea of delicacy
accompanying their gifts, so that they generally rendered them
either useless or ridiculous.”

He did, indeed, say very contemptuous things of our sex, but
was exceedingly angry when I told Miss Reynolds that he said
“It was well managed of some one to leave his affairs in
the hands of his wife, because, in matters of business,”
said he, “no woman stops at integrity.” This
was, I think, the only sentence I ever observed him solicitous to
explain away after he had uttered it. He was not at all
displeased at the recollection of a sarcasm thrown on a whole
profession at once; when a gentleman leaving the company,
somebody who sat next Dr. Johnson asked him, who he was?
“I cannot exactly tell you, sir,” replied he,
“and I would be loth to speak ill of any person who I do
not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an
attorney.” He did not, however, encourage
general satire, and for the most part professed himself to feel
directly contrary to Dr. Swift; “who,” says he,
“hates the world, though he loves John and Robert, and
certain individuals.”

Johnson said always, “that the world was well
constructed, but that the particular people disgraced the
elegance and beauty of the general fabric.” In the
same manner I was relating once to him how Dr. Collier observed
that the love one bore to children was from the anticipation
one’s mind made while one contemplated them.
“We hope,” says he, “that they will sometime
make wise men or amiable women; and we suffer ’em to take
up our affection beforehand. One cannot love lumps of
flesh, and little infants are nothing more.”
“On the contrary,” says Johnson, “one can
scarcely help wishing, while one fondles a baby, that it may
never live to become a man; for it is so probable that when he
becomes a man, he should be sure to end in a
scoundrel.” Girls were less displeasing to him;
“for as their temptations were fewer,” he said,
“their virtue in this life, and happiness in the next, were
less improbable; and he loved,” he said, “to see a
knot of little misses dearly.”

Needlework had a strenuous approver in Dr. Johnson, who said
“that one of the great felicities of female life was the
general consent of the world that they might amuse themselves
with petty occupations, which contributed to the lengthening
their lives, and preserving their minds in a state of
sanity.” “A man cannot hem a
pocket-handkerchief,” said a lady of quality to him one
day, “and so he runs mad, and torments his family and
friends.” The expression struck him exceedingly, and
when one acquaintance grew troublesome, and another unhealthy, he
used to quote Lady Frances’s observation, “That a man
cannot hem a pocket-handkerchief.”

The nice people found no mercy from Mr. Johnson; such, I mean,
as can only dine at four o’clock, who cannot bear to be
waked at an unusual hour, or miss a stated meal without
inconvenience. He had no such prejudices himself,
and with difficulty forgave them in another.
“Delicacy does not surely consist,” says he,
“in impossibility to be pleased, and that is false dignity
indeed which is content to depend upon others.”

The saying of the old philosopher who observes, “That he
who wants least is most like the gods, who want nothing,”
was a favourite sentence with Dr. Johnson, who on his own part
required less attendance, sick or well, than ever I saw any human
creature. Conversation was all he required to make him
happy; and when he would have tea made at two o’clock in
the morning, it was only that there might be a certainty of
detaining his companions round him. On that principle it
was that he preferred winter to summer, when the heat of the
weather gave people an excuse to stroll about and walk for
pleasure in the shade, while he wished to sit still on a chair
and chat day after day, till somebody proposed a drive in the
coach, and that was the most delicious moment of his life.
“But the carriage must stop some time,” he said,
“and the people would come home at last,” so his
pleasure was of short duration.

I asked him why he doated on a coach so? and received for
answer, “That in the first place the company were shut in
with him there, and could not escape, as out of a
room. In the next place, he heard all that was said in a
carriage, where it was my turn to be deaf,” and very
impatient was he at my occasional difficulty of hearing. On
this account he wished to travel all over the world, for the very
act of going forward was delightful to him, and he gave himself
no concern about accidents, which he said never happened.
Nor did the running away of the horses on the edge of a precipice
between Vernon and St. Denis, in France, convince him to the
contrary, “for nothing came of it,” he said,
“except that Mr. Thrale leaped out of the carriage into a
chalk-pit, and then came up again looking as
white!” When the truth was, all their lives were
saved by the greatest Providence ever exerted in favour of three
human creatures; and the part Mr. Thrale took from desperation
was the likeliest thing in the world to produce broken limbs and
death.

Fear was indeed a sensation to which Mr. Johnson was an utter
stranger, excepting when some sudden apprehensions seized him
that he was going to die, and even then he kept all his wits
about him to express the most humble and pathetic petitions to
the Almighty. And when the first paralytic stroke took his
speech from him, he instantly set about composing a prayer in
Latin, at once to deprecate God’s mercy, to satisfy himself
that his mental powers remained unimpaired, and to keep them in
exercise, that they might not perish by permitted
stagnation. This was after we parted; but he wrote me an
account of it, and I intend to publish that letter, with many
more.

When one day he had at my house taken tincture of antimony
instead of emetic wine, for a vomit, he was himself the person to
direct us what to do for him, and managed with as much coolness
and deliberation as if he had been prescribing for an indifferent
person. Though on another occasion, when he had lamented in
the most piercing terms his approaching dissolution, and conjured
me solemnly to tell him what I thought, while Sir Richard Jebb
was perpetually on the road to Streatham, and Mr. Johnson seemed
to think himself neglected if the physician left him for an hour
only, I made him a steady, but as I thought a very gentle
harangue, in which I confirmed all that the doctor had been
saying; how no present danger could be expected, but that his age
and continued ill-health must naturally accelerate the arrival of
that hour which can be escaped by none. “And
this,” says Johnson, rising in great anger, “is the
voice of female friendship, I suppose, when the hand of the
hangman would be softer.”

Another day, when he was ill, and exceedingly low-spirited,
and persuaded that death was not far distant, I appeared before
him in a dark-coloured gown, which his bad sight, and worse
apprehensions, made him mistake for an iron-grey.
“Why do you delight,” said he, “thus to thicken
the gloom of misery that surrounds me? Is not here
sufficient accumulation of horror without anticipated
mourning?” “This is not mourning, sir,”
said I, drawing the curtain, that the light might fall upon the
silk, and show it was a purple mixed with green.
“Well, well,” replied he, changing his voice,
“you little creatures should never wear those sort of
clothes, however; they are unsuitable in every way. What!
have not all insects gay colours?” I relate these
instances chiefly to show that the fears of death itself could
not suppress his wit, his sagacity, or his temptation to sudden
resentment.

Mr. Johnson did not like that his friends should bring their
manuscripts for him to read, and he liked still less to read them
when they were brought. Sometimes, however, when he could
not refuse, he would take the play or poem, or whatever it was,
and give the people his opinion from some one page he had peeped
into. A gentleman carried him his tragedy, which, because
he loved the author, Johnson took, and it lay about our rooms
some time. “What answer did you give your friend,
sir?” said I, after the book had been called for.
“I told him,” replied he, “that there was too
much Tig and Tirry in it!” Seeing me
laugh most violently, “Why, what would’st have,
child?” said he. “I looked at the dramatis, and
there was Tigranes and Tiridates, or Teribazus, or
such stuff. A man can tell but what he knows, and I never
got any farther than the first page. Alas, madam!”
continued he, “how few books are there of which one ever
can possibly arrive at the last page. Was there ever
yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its
readers, excepting ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Robinson
Crusoe,’ and the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress?’” After Homer’s Iliad, Mr.
Johnson confessed that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in
the world, speaking of it I mean as a book of
entertainment. And when we consider that every other
author’s admirers are confined to his countrymen, and
perhaps to the literary classes among them, while
“Don Quixote” is a sort of common property, an
universal classic, equally tasted by the court and the cottage,
equally applauded in France and England as in Spain, quoted by
every servant, the amusement of every age from infancy to
decrepitude; the first book you see on every shelf, in every
shop, where books are sold, through all the states of Italy; who
can refuse his consent to an avowal of the superiority of
Cervantes to all other modern writers? Shakespeare himself
has, till lately, been worshipped only at home, though his plays
are now the favourite amusements of Vienna; and when I was at
Padua some months ago, Romeo and Juliet was acted there under the
name of Tragedia Veronese; while engravers and translators
live by the hero of La Mancha in every nation, and the
sides of miserable inns all over England and France, and I have
heard Germany too, are adorned with the exploits of Don
Quixote. May his celebrity procure my pardon for a
digression in praise of a writer who, through four volumes of the
most exquisite pleasantry and genuine humour, has never been
seduced to overstep the limits of propriety, has never called in
the wretched auxiliaries of obscenity or profaneness; who trusts
to nature and sentiment alone, and never misses of that applause
which Voltaire and Sterne labour to produce, while honest
merriment bestows her unfading crown upon Cervantes.

Dr. Johnson was a great reader of French literature, and
delighted exceedingly in Boileau’s works. Moliere, I
think, he had hardly sufficient taste of, and he used to condemn
me for preferring La Bruyere to the Duc de Rochefoucault, who, he
said, was the only gentleman writer who wrote like a professed
author. The asperity of his harsh sentences, each of them a
sentence of condemnation, used to disgust me, however; though it
must be owned that, among the necessaries of human life, a rasp
is reckoned one as well as a razor.

Mr. Johnson did not like any one who said they were happy, or
who said any one else was so. “It is all cant,”
he would cry; “the dog knows he is miserable all the
time.” A friend whom he loved exceedingly, told him
on some occasion, notwithstanding, that his wife’s sister
was really happy, and called upon the lady to confirm his
assertion, which she did somewhat roundly, as we say, and with an
accent and manner capable of offending Mr. Johnson, if her
position had not been sufficient, without anything more, to put
him in very ill-humour. “If your sister-in-law is
really the contented being she professes herself, sir,”
said he, “her life gives the lie to every research of
humanity; for she is happy without health, without beauty,
without money, and without understanding.” This story
he told me himself, and when I expressed something of the horror
I felt, “The same stupidity,” said he, “which
prompted her to extol felicity she never felt, hindered her from
feeling what shocks you on repetition. I tell you, the
woman is ugly and sickly and foolish and poor; and would it not
make a man hang himself to hear such a creature say it was
happy?

“The life of a sailor was also a continual scene of
danger and exertion,” he said; “and the manner in
which time was spent shipboard would make all who saw a cabin
envy a gaol.” The roughness of the language used on
board a man-of-war, where he passed a week on a visit to Captain
Knight, disgusted him terribly. He asked an officer what
some place was called, and received for answer, that it was where
the loplolly man kept his loplolly, a reply he considered, not
unjustly, as disrespectful, gross, and ignorant; for though in
the course of these memoirs I have been led to mention Dr.
Johnson’s tenderness towards poor people, I do not
wish to mislead my readers, and make them think he had any
delight in mean manners or coarse expressions. Even
dress itself, when it resembled that of the vulgar, offended him
exceedingly; and when he had condemned me many times for not
adorning my children with more show than I thought useful or
elegant, I presented a little girl to him who came
o’visiting one evening covered with shining ornaments, to
see if he would approve of the appearance she made. When
they were gone home, “Well, sir,” said I, “how
did you like little miss? I hope she was fine
enough.” “It was the finery of a beggar,”
said he, “and you know it was; she looked like a native of
Cow Lane dressed up to be carried to Bartholomew Fair.”

His reprimand to another lady for crossing her little
child’s handkerchief before, and by that operation dragging
down its head oddly and unintentionally, was on the same
principle. “It is the beggar’s fear of
cold,” said he, “that prevails over such parents, and
so they pull the poor thing’s head down, and give it the
look of a baby that plays about Westminster Bridge, while the
mother sits shivering in a niche.”

I commended a young lady for her beauty and pretty behaviour
one day, however, to whom I thought no objection could have been
made. “I saw her,” says Dr. Johnson,
“take a pair of scissors in her left hand, though; and for
all her father is now become a nobleman, and as you say,
excessively rich, I should, were I a youth of quality ten years
hence, hesitate between a girl so neglected, and a
negro.”

It was indeed astonishing how he could remark such
minutenesses with a sight so miserably imperfect; but no
accidental position of a ribband escaped him, so nice was his
observation, and so rigorous his demands of propriety. When
I went with him to Lichfield and came downstairs to breakfast at
the inn, my dress did not please him, and he made me alter it
entirely before he would stir a step with us about the town,
saying most satirical things concerning the appearance I made in
a riding-habit, and adding, “’Tis very strange that
such eyes as yours cannot discern propriety of dress. If I
had a sight only half as good, I think I should see to the
centre.”

My compliances, however, were of little worth. What
really surprised me was the victory he gained over a lady little
accustomed to contradiction, who had dressed herself for church
at Streatham one Sunday morning in a manner he did not approve,
and to whom he said such sharp and pungent things concerning her
hat, her gown, etc., that she hastened to change them, and
returning quite another figure received his applause, and thanked
him for his reproofs, much to the amazement of her husband, who
could scarcely believe his own ears.

Another lady, whose accomplishments he never denied, came to
our house one day covered with diamonds, feathers, etc., and he
did not seem inclined to chat with her as usual. I asked
him why, when the company was gone. “Why, her head
looked so like that of a woman who shows puppets,” said he,
“and her voice so confirmed the fancy, that I could not
bear her to-day. When she wears a large cap I can talk to
her.”

When the ladies wore lace trimmings to their clothes he
expressed his contempt of the reigning fashion in these terms:
“A Brussels trimming is like bread sauce,” said he,
“it takes away the glow of colour from the gown, and gives
you nothing instead of it. But sauce was invented to
heighten the flavour of our food, and trimming is an ornament to
the manteau or it is nothing. Learn,” said he,
“that there is propriety or impropriety in everything how
slight soever, and get at the general principles of dress and of
behaviour; if you then transgress them you will at least know
that they are not observed.”

All these exactnesses in a man who was nothing less than exact
himself made him extremely impracticable as an inmate, though
most instructive as companion and useful as a friend. Mr.
Thrale, too, could sometimes overrule his rigidity by saying
coldly, “There, there, now we have had enough for one
lecture, Dr. Johnson. We will not be upon education any
more till after dinner, if you please,” or some such
speech. But when there was nobody to restrain his dislikes
it was extremely difficult to find anybody with whom he could
converse without living always on the verge of a quarrel, or of
something too like a quarrel to be pleasing. I came into
the room, for example, one evening where he and a gentleman,
whose abilities we all respect exceedingly, were sitting. A
lady who walked in two minutes before me had blown ’em both
into a flame by whispering something to Mr. S---d, which he
endeavoured to explain away so as not to affront the Doctor,
whose suspicions were all alive. “And have a care,
sir,” said he, just as I came in, “the Old Lion will
not bear to be tickled.” The other was pale with
rage, the lady wept at the confusion she had caused, and I could
only say with Lady Macbeth—

“Soh! you’ve displac’d the
mirth, broke the good meeting
With most admir’d disorder.”

Such accidents, however, occurred too often, and I was forced
to take advantage of my lost lawsuit and plead inability of purse
to remain longer in London or its vicinage. I had been
crossed in my intentions of going abroad, and found it
convenient, for every reason of health, peace, and pecuniary
circumstances, to retire to Bath, where I knew Mr. Johnson would
not follow me, and where I could for that reason command some
little portion of time for my own use, a thing impossible while I
remained at Streatham or at London, as my hours, carriage, and
servants had long been at his command, who would not rise in the
morning till twelve o’clock, perhaps, and oblige me to make
breakfast for him till the bell rung for dinner, though much
displeased if the toilet was neglected, and though much of the
time we passed together was spent in blaming or deriding, very
justly, my neglect of economy and waste of that money which might
make many families happy. The original reason of our
connection, his particularly disordered health and
spirits, had been long at an end, and he had no other
ailments than old age and general infirmity, which every
professor of medicine was ardently zealous and generally
attentive to palliate, and to contribute all in their power for
the prolongation of a life so valuable. Veneration for his
virtue, reverence for his talents, delight in his conversation,
and habitual endurance of a yoke my husband first put upon me,
and of which he contentedly bore his share for sixteen or
seventeen years, made me go on so long with Mr. Johnson; but the
perpetual confinement I will own to have been terrifying in the
first years of our friendship and irksome in the last. Nor
could I pretend to support it without help, when my coadjutor was
no more. To the assistance we gave him, the shelter our
house afforded to his uneasy fancies, and to the pains we took to
soothe or repress them, the world perhaps is indebted for the
three political pamphlets, the new edition and correction of his
“Dictionary,” and for the “Poets’
Lives,” which he would scarce have lived, I think, and kept
his faculties entire to have written, had not incessant care been
exerted at the time of his first coming to be our constant guest
in the country, and several times after that, when he found
himself particularly oppressed with diseases incident to the most
vivid and fervent imaginations. I shall for ever consider
it as the greatest honour which could be conferred on any one to
have been the confidential friend of Dr. Johnson’s health,
and to have in some measure, with Mr. Thrale’s assistance,
saved from distress at least, if not worse, a mind great beyond
the comprehension of common mortals, and good beyond all hope of
imitation from perishable beings.

Many of our friends were earnest that he should write the
lives of our famous prose authors; but he never made any answer
that I can recollect to the proposal, excepting when Sir Richard
Musgrave once was singularly warm about it, getting up and
entreating him to set about the work immediately, he coldly
replied, “Sit down, sir!”

When Mr. Thrale built the new library at Streatham, and hung
up over the books the portraits of his favourite friends, that of
Dr. Johnson was last finished, and closed the number. It
was almost impossible not to make verses on such an
accidental combination of circumstances, so I made the following
ones. But as a character written in verse will for the most
part be found imperfect as a character, I have therefore written
a prose one, with which I mean, not to complete, but to conclude
these “Anecdotes” of the best and wisest man that
ever came within the reach of my personal acquaintance, and I
think I might venture to add, that of all or any of my
readers:—

Gigantic in knowledge, in virtue, in strength,
Our company closes with Johnson at
length;
So the Greeks from the cavern of Polypheme past,
When wisest, and greatest, Ulysses came last.
To his comrades contemptuous we see him look down,
On their wit and their worth with a general frown.
Since from Science’ proud tree the rich fruit he
receives,
Who could shake the whole trunk while they turned a few
leaves.
His piety pure, his morality nice—
Protector of virtue, and terror of vice;
In these features Religion’s firm champion displayed,
Shall make infidels fear for a modern crusade.
While th’ inflammable temper, the positive tongue,
Too conscious of right for endurance of wrong:
We suffer from Johnson, contented to
find,
That some notice we gain from so noble a mind;
And pardon our hurts, since so often we’ve found
The balm of instruction poured into the wound.
’Tis thus for its virtues the chemists extol
Pure rectified spirit, sublime alcohol;
From noxious putrescence, preservative pure,
A cordial in health, and in sickness a cure;
But exposed to the sun, taking fire at his rays,
Burns bright to the bottom, and ends in a blaze.

It is usual, I know not why, when a character is given, to
begin with a description of the person. That which
contained the soul of Mr. Johnson deserves to be particularly
described. His stature was remarkably high, and his limbs
exceedingly large. His strength was more than common, I
believe, and his activity had been greater, I have heard, than
such a form gave one reason to expect. His features were
strongly marked, and his countenance particularly rugged; though
the original complexion had certainly been fair, a circumstance
somewhat unusual. His sight was near, and otherwise
imperfect; yet his eyes, though of a light grey colour, were so
wild, so piercing, and at times so fierce, that fear was, I
believe, the first emotion in the hearts of all his
beholders. His mind was so comprehensive, that no language
but that he used could have expressed its contents; and so
ponderous was his language, that sentiments less lofty and less
solid than his were would have been encumbered, not adorned by
it.

Mr. Johnson was not intentionally, however, a pompous
converser; and though he was accused of using big words, as they
are called, it was only when little ones would not express his
meaning as clearly, or when, perhaps, the elevation of the
thought would have been disgraced by a dress less superb.
He used to say, “that the size of a man’s
understanding might always be justly measured by his
mirth,” and his own was never contemptible. He would
laugh at a stroke of genuine humour, or sudden sally of odd
absurdity, as heartily and freely as I ever yet saw any man; and
though the jest was often such as few felt besides himself, yet
his laugh was irresistible, and was observed immediately to
produce that of the company, not merely from the notion that it
was proper to laugh when he did, but purely out of want of power
to forbear it. He was no enemy to splendour of apparel or
pomp of equipage. “Life,” he would say,
“is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us
therefore be cautious how we strip her.” In matters
of still higher moment he once observed, when speaking on the
subject of sudden innovation, “He who plants a forest may
doubtless cut down a hedge; yet I could wish, methinks, that even
he would wait till he sees his young plants grow.”

With regard to common occurrences, Mr. Johnson had, when I
first knew him, looked on the still-shifting scenes of life till
he was weary; for as a mind slow in its own nature, or
unenlivened by information, will contentedly read in the same
book for twenty times, perhaps, the very act of reading it being
more than half the business, and every period being at every
reading better understood; while a mind more active or more
skilful to comprehend its meaning is made sincerely sick at the
second perusal; so a soul like his, acute to discern the truth,
vigorous to embrace, and powerful to retain it, soon sees enough
of the world’s dull prospect, which at first, like that of
the sea, pleases by its extent, but soon, like that, too,
fatigues from its uniformity; a calm and a storm being the only
variations that the nature of either will admit.

Of Mr. Johnson’s erudition the world has been the judge,
and we who produce each a score of his sayings, as proofs of that
wit which in him was inexhaustible, resemble travellers who,
having visited Delhi or Golconda, bring home each a handful of
Oriental pearl to evince the riches of the Great Mogul. May
the public condescend to accept my ill-strung selection
with patience at least, remembering only that they are relics of
him who was great on all occasions, and, like a cube in
architecture, you beheld him on each side, and his size still
appeared undiminished.

As his purse was ever open to almsgiving, so was his heart
tender to those who wanted relief, and his soul susceptible of
gratitude, and of every kind impression: yet though he had
refined his sensibility he had not endangered his quiet, by
encouraging in himself a solicitude about trifles, which he
treated with the contempt they deserve.

It was well enough known before these sheets were published,
that Mr. Johnson had a roughness in his manner which subdued the
saucy, and terrified the meek; this was, when I knew him, the
prominent part of a character which few durst venture to approach
so nearly; and which was for that reason in many respects grossly
and frequently mistaken, and it was perhaps peculiar to him, that
the lofty consciousness of his own superiority which animated his
looks, and raised his voice in conversation, cast likewise an
impenetrable veil over him when he said nothing. His talk,
therefore, had commonly the complexion of arrogance, his silence
of superciliousness. He was, however, seldom inclined to be
silent when any moral or literary question was started; and it
was on such occasions that, like the sage in
“Rasselas,” he spoke, and attention watched his lips;
he reasoned, and conviction closed his periods; if poetry was
talked of, his quotations were the readiest; and had he not been
eminent for more solid and brilliant qualities, mankind would
have united to extol his extraordinary memory. His manner
of repeating deserves to be described, though at the same time it
defeats all power of description; but whoever once heard him
repeat an ode of Horace would be long before they could endure to
hear it repeated by another.

His equity in giving the character of living acquaintance
ought not undoubtedly to be omitted in his own, whence partiality
and prejudice were totally excluded, and truth alone presided in
his tongue, a steadiness of conduct the more to be commended, as
no man had stronger likings or aversions. His veracity was,
indeed, from the most trivial to the most solemn occasions,
strict, even to severity; he scorned to embellish a story with
fictitious circumstances, which, he used to say, took off from
its real value. “A story,” says Johnson,
“should be a specimen of life and manners; but if the
surrounding circumstances are false, as it is no more a
representation of reality, it is no longer worthy our
attention.”

For the rest—that beneficence which during his life
increased the comforts of so many may after his death be,
perhaps, ungratefully forgotten; but that piety which dictated
the serious papers in the “Rambler” will be for ever
remembered; for ever, I think, revered. That ample
repository of religious truth, moral wisdom, and accurate
criticism, breathes, indeed, the genuine emanations of its great
author’s mind, expressed, too, in a style so natural to
him, and so much like his common mode of conversing, that I was
myself but little astonished when he told me that he had scarcely
read over one of those inimitable essays before they went to the
press.

I will add one or two peculiarities more before I lay down my
pen. Though at an immeasurable distance from content in the
contemplation of his own uncouth form and figure, he did not like
another man much the less for being a coxcomb. I mentioned
two friends who were particularly fond of looking at themselves
in a glass. “They do not surprise me at all by so
doing,” said Johnson; “they see, reflected in that
glass, men who have risen from almost the lowest situations in
life; one to enormous riches, the other to everything this world
can give—rank, fame, and fortune. They see, likewise,
men who have merited their advancement by the exertion and
improvement of those talents which God had given them; and I see
not why they should avoid the mirror.”

The other singularity I promised to record is this: That
though a man of obscure birth himself, his partiality to people
of family was visible on every occasion; his zeal for
subordination warm even to bigotry; his hatred to innovation, and
reverence for the old feudal times, apparent, whenever any
possible manner of showing them occurred. I have spoken of
his piety, his charity, and his truth, the enlargement of his
heart, and the delicacy of his sentiments; and when I search for
shadow to my portrait, none can I find but what was formed by
pride, differently modified as different occasions showed it; yet
never was pride so purified as Johnson’s, at once from
meanness and from vanity. The mind of this man was, indeed,
expanded beyond the common limits of human nature, and stored
with such variety of knowledge, that I used to think it resembled
a royal pleasure ground, where every plant, of every name and
nation, flourished in the full perfection of their powers, and
where, though lofty woods and falling cataracts first caught the
eye, and fixed the earliest attention of beholders, yet neither
the trim parterre nor the pleasing shrubbery, nor even the
antiquated evergreens, were denied a place in some fit corner of
the happy valley.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL
JOHNSON, LL.D.***

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